The first key problem facing Advanced Telephone is how to segment the perceived home office market. Advanced Telephone has conducted market surveys with regard to the home worker (HW) market, but it questions the results of these surveys for a number of reasons. At this point, Advanced Telephone has settled on three segmentation options: self-employed, moonlighter and corporate. The corporate workers constitute both the most number of households and the greatest number of individuals who participate in the home office market, although they spend the least number of hours per week working at home. These individuals are employed full-time outside the home and continue the work from this outside office in their home environment.
Moonlighters represent the second greatest number of households, but the third largest number of individuals in the home office market. Like their corporate counterparts, these individuals have work outside the home, but they also use their home as an office for a business unrelated to their full-time job. They work at home more than the corporate home worker, but less than the fully self-employed person.
The third segment that Advanced recognizes, the wholly self employed individual, works the most hours at home, has the fewest number of households represented, but the greatest number of individuals. These are people who do not have outside employment but who are totally financially dependent on the income they generate from their home offices.
Based on the information that Advanced Telephone has collected and the type of work performed by individuals, the segmentation may be incomplete. Instead of segmenting the market into three groups, the company might be better off to segment it into two groups, the self-employed and the corporate home worker. This would mean combining the self-employed and moonlighting segments. This approach increases the self-employed segment from 8.6 million household...