Segment your marketing
Your marketing plan should recognize the various segments of the market for your product or service and indicate how to adjust your product to reach those distinct markets. Instead of marketing a product in one way to everyone, you must recognize that some segments are not only different, but better than others for your product.
This approach can be helpful in penetrating markets that would be too broad and undefined without segmentation. No matter what you are making or selling, take the total market and divide it up like a pie chart. The divisions can be based on various criteria.
Demographics- This is the study of the distribution, density and vital statistics of a population, and includes such characteristics as:
Sex.
Age.
Education.
Geographic location.
Home ownership versus rental.
Marital status.
Size of family unit.
Total income of family unit.
Ethnic or religious background.
Job classification, blue collar versus salaried or professional.
Psychographics- This is the study of how the human characteristics of consumers may have a bearing on their response to products, packaging, advertising and public relations efforts. Behavior may be measured as it involves an interplay among these broad sets of variables:
Predisposition- What is there about a person’s past culture, heredity or upbringing that may influence his or her ability to consider purchasing one new product or service versus another?
Influences- What are the roles of social forces such as education, peer pressure or group acceptance in dictating a person’s consumption patterns?
Product Attributes- What the product is or can be made to represent in the minds of consumers has a significant bearing on whether certain segments will accept the concept. These attributes may be suggested by the marketer or perceived by the customer.
Some typical ways of describing a product include:
1. Price/value perception- Is the item worth the price being asked?
2. Taste- Does it have the right amount of sweetness or lightness?
3. Texture- Does it have the accepted consistency or feel?
4. Quality- What can be said about the quality of the ingredients or lack of artificial ingredients?
5. Benefits- How does the consumer feel after using the product?
6. Trust- Can the consumer rely on this particular brand? What about the reputation of the manufacturer in standing behind the product?
In conclusion- Life Style. Statements consumers make about themselves through conspicuous consumption can be put to good use by research people who read the signals correctly. By studying behavioral variables, such as a person’s use of time, services and products, researchers can identify some common factors that can predict future behavior determining which marketing segment relates directly towards the products or services being sold.
The real key to successful marketing is to identify the market segments you wish to reach and then tabulate the results of your marketing efforts until you find out what works best for you, and then keep repeating your successes.
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