#145 - Ryan Hamilton: Growing and Managing Customer Segments Successfully

Outthinkers · 2025-07-01 · 47 min

Episode notes

Ryan Hamilton is an associate professor of marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things . He is also co-host of the podcast The Intuitive Customer, and author of a book by the same name. He has consulted on branding with companies like Walmart, FedEx, Home Depot, Caterpillar, ConAgra, Cigna, Visa, and Ipsos, among others. To start a successful brand, you usually need to focus in on a specific, often niche, customer. But to grow the brand, you need to expand your customer base. A few brands have done this well (e.g., Starbucks or Apple) which have this loyal passionate base of fans that stick with them as the brands become ubiquitous. But, more often, brands fail to scale because the new customer they need in order to scale are too different from those core customers. They have different values or needs or beliefs. In this episode, we dive into this dilemma, discussing how to predict, preempt, and manage the conflicts that will arise between a brand’s initial customers and the more varied customer segments it must attract in order to scale.

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