Briefly explain residual variation in the product and service requirements of a market segment

What will be an ideal response?

Business market managers start with the realization that no matter how precisely a firm segments a market, some residual variation in the product and service requirements of segment members will remain. That is, even though customers within a segment may be essentially the same in some of their requirements, they remain different in others. In the past, suppliers either ignored or were unable to deal with this variation, choosing instead to provide market offerings composed of "standard" bundles or packages of products and services designed to meet the needs of the "average" customer within each segment. Even worse, in many instances, suppliers have provided essentially the same "vanilla" offering across all segments. As a result, some customers felt that they were forced to pay for services they did not need, whereas others did not get the depth of service they required, even if they were willing to pay extra.