Source: Image of game plan, crowd, crowd with one person highlighted, casual man, casual woman, images by Video Scribe, License held by Jeff Carroll; Image of United States, Creative Commons, http://bit.ly/Szo9xj; Image of man fishing, Public Domain, http://bit.ly/1x4I4DQ.
Hi, I'm Jeff. And in this lesson, we'll talk about marketing strategy, including the concepts of target markets and market segmentation. So let's get started.
As you might remember, the marketing strategy is a plan to make the most efficient use of all the tools available for marketing products and services. A marketing strategy is two parts, selecting the target market through analysis to focus upon and getting the four P's of product, price, place, and promotion setup to be optimized for this target market. But what is the target market?
A target market is an identified cluster of customers that are the focus of the business, specifically marketing and efforts. When a target market is identified, a company can make intelligent choices about the resources it has at its disposal for marketing. Without a target market, the company may be forced to market to everyone. When a company markets to everyone that is called an undifferentiated method, but when a company focuses only on a subset of the market, that is called market segmentation.
Market segmentation is a marketing process where the market as a whole is subdivided into categories of potential consumers based on traits, and then each subdivided group is focused on four specific marketing efforts. There are three options to segment a market geographic segmentation. The market is segmented by physical locations and boundaries.
For example, the United States can be divided into the Northeast, Southern, West and Midwest regions. Demographic segmentation, the market is broken down by gender, age, or some other physical characteristics of a people. For example, Levi jeans will target its market differently to men or women. And psychographic variables, these are the many psychological and personality traits that people express.
For example, variables such as self-sufficiency and patience might combine in similar ways for people who hunt or fish. So these variables can be used to define a target audience. OK, good job.
In this lesson, we discussed the marketing strategy. We learned about target markets and market segmentation. And we talked about different types of market segmentation. Thanks for your time, and have a great day.
