Page 47 - Marketing the Basics 2nd

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6 Actionable: The segment must respond to programs that are tailored to attract their attention.
Let us give you an example of how clothing stores go after two different segments. A teenage girls’ clothing shop plays music attractive to them, a parent’s reaction is, ‘they call that music?’, the teen salesperson is wearing braces and chewing gum, which looks dangerous! A parent’s job is to sit on a bench outside in the mall, reading the newspaper, drinking a cappuccino and yelling into the shop every ten minutes or so, ‘It’s too short!’, thinking this is generally wise advice for her teenage daughter. A clothing shop for her father is quite different. It plays classical music or light jazz in the background, you can hear yourself think, they provide a cappuccino, the wood panelling is dark and the lights are pleasantly muted. When the tailor measures you for a suit, he says, ‘Sir, I can see you have had a prosperous year’, meaning you have put weight on, yet he knows how to put it in the best possible light. Each shop is tailored to its respective segment and the target segment of the other is frankly a bit put off by the other’s shop environment.
SEGMENTING CONSUMER MARKETS
There are many ways of segmenting consumer markets as illustrated by Figure 3.1.
Here is a list of a few of the most popular ways to segment a market:
GEOGRAPHIC SEGMENTATION
Geographic segmentation entails dividing the market into smaller geographical units. These units can represent nations, provinces, counties, cities, neighbourhoods, streets and even individual addresses. There are firms in the US, Canada, the UK and other countries that will sell you data based on census data at the level of a postal code.
Geographic segmentation provides companies with the opportunity to tailor their products to suit the tastes and preferences of a unique region. In the Basque regions of Spain, residents speak Basque as their first language, not Spanish. They also are fiercely