Target marketing, also sometimes known as niche marketing is the art of marketing only to a desired target market. Thus target marketing mainly involves two steps such as
1) Deciding your market segment as well as deciding on who your target customer is going to be.
2) Designing your marketing mix with the proper product, price, promotions and place such that your target market adopts it quickly.
In this atmosphere of turmoil, Mumbai mirror comes out with the perfect strategy of Emotional marketing. In today’s age, with the amount of corruption and lack of development, people do want to speak up. They do want to point their fingers at someone. But who do you target? Well, Mumbai mirror does that for you by targeting politicians, government offices and even people who are too busy in their life to look around or to notice the state of other human beings in their surroundings.
Segmentation is used mainly to target a certain group from within a population. Psychographic segmentation is one which uses peoples lifestyle, their activities, interests as well as opinions to define a market segment. Psychographic segmentation is quite similar to behavioral segmentation. But psychographic segmentation also takes the psychological aspects of consumer buying behavior into accounts. These psychological aspects may be consumers lifestyle, his social standing as well as his AIO. Do refer more to Activities, interests and opinons.
AIO or Activities interests and opinions is one of the methods to carry out psychographic segmentation. AIO is mainly used to define an individuals psychographic profile. It tells a marketer of what a consumer likes, what are his interests and how does his thought process work. This is deduced through a series of questions asked by a market researcher which ultimately gives the consumers psychographic profile.
Vals which is also known as values attitude and lifestyle is one of the primary ways to perform psychographic segmentation. All three terms are intangible in nature and therefore give an idea of the inert nature of the consumer. If you know what your consumer is thinking, you would know what kind of promotions or communications will attract him most. And how do you know what the consumer is thinking? By determining his vals – Values, attitudes and lifestyle.
VALS is different for different people. Lets take income as an example. If you are a person with high income your lifestyle would probably include habits of the SEC A class such as dining out of home frequently and that too in top class restaurants, wearing only branded clothes and buying the best cars out there. Whereas if you are a middle class income group consumer, you would be more wary of spending money and would rather concentrate on savings.
Segmentation also has its limitations as it needs to be implemented in the proper manner. As segmentation is one of the most important process in the marketing plan or for your business, you need to know what pitfalls lie ahead if you go wrong with your target market segment.
1) Segments are too small – If the chosen segment is too small then you will not have the proper turnover which in turn will affect the total margins and the viability of the business.
Behavioral segmentation divides a population based on their behavior, the way the population respond to, use or know of a product. Consumer behavior is a subject studied in depth over time in marketing management. This is mainly because there are several factors which a consumer takes into consideration before taking a decision. Thus consumer decision making is affected by his behavior and that is exactly how the behavioral segments are targeted.
Lets take a simple example of behavioral segmentation. I am writing this article in the month of December which is Christmas time. Christmas is on the 25th of December. Would you start targeting your segment on the 23rd or 24th of December? You will probably start targeting that segment from 1st December itself. After Christmas we have new year. Thus both of the occasions are such that companies would have to finalize which behavior they want to target. They cannot target both as it leaves only 6 days for the marketing of new year. Example – Hotels and restaurants will target new year as they will have more customers over the new year which is a moment of outdoor celebration whereas Christmas is more of a family celebration. Several other mass marketing companies strategically target “Christmas and new year”.
Forms of Behavioral segmentation
Buying on occasions – As mentioned in the above example, buying on occasions is the first form of behavioral segmentation. Products such as chocolates and premium foods will sell on festivals. Similarly, confectioneries will sell when there is a party. Thus these products are generally targeted by behavioral segmentation.
The best example of targeting buying on occasions is Hallmark cards – greeting cards for all occasions. The primary targeting of hallmark was that be it any occasion, you will find the right kind of card for you. Thus you have the perfect option to express yourself.
Benefits sought – Several products are targeted towards the benefits sought by the customer. Recently, there has been a war between Colgate and sensodyne to target the people who have sensitive teeth. Similarly, there are other toothpastes which are targeted towards whitening of teeth. Hair shampoos are targeted towards split ends, anti dandruff or others.
The above examples explain what is the role of benefits in behavioral segmentation. Thus a marketer can divide a population based on the benefits they seek within a product.
Loyalty – There are two ways to grow a business. First is to acquire new customers and second is to retain your existing customers. The more loyal your customer is to you, the more your customer base will increase. That’s one more kind of behavior which marketers target. The strategies for brand loyal customers is very different from that used for acquiring new customers.
The best example of behavioral segmentation by loyalty is observed in the hospitality segment wherein airlines, hotels, restaurants and others give their best to provide the best service possible such that they can retain their customer. The hospitality sector is the one with the best loyalty programs ever. Thus the loyalty of the customer can also be used for behavioral segmentation.
Usage rate – In residential or commercial segment, the usage can be demonstrated in the form of heavy usage, moderate usage or lesser usage. Lets take the example of beauty parlors or personal care. There are some customers who use a lot of personal care products whereas others do not use personal care products much. Thus depending on their usage the customers can be targeted.
Another example of usage rate segmentations can be seen in the electronics as well as the FMCG industry in industrial buying. FMCG and electronics works on the basis of a channel with dealers and distributors. In these segments, the maximum discount goes to the one who buys the maximum whereas others get lesser profits as they also get lesser discounts.
Any product which is not targeted towards the masses generally used behavioral segmentation. It is also an excellent form of segmentation for products which are niche in nature and are targeted towards the wants and demands of customers.
Perception can be defined as an image which consumer forms of an offering before or after its usage.
Before the advent of internet, which led to free access to vast pool of information, consumer choices were more dependent on word of mouth and what company has to say about its offerings. But come internet and these all channels became less effective as consumers now had information on the go and has plethora of options to choose from. In this era of free information flow, the orthodox way of mass marketing needs a serious consideration before an organization pumps fortunes in it.
Looking at the perception formation model, the integrated marketing communication does have an impact on consumers mind and forms a blur image in his mind which evokes him to look out for more information about the offering from peers and if he gets positive inputs probably it converts into a purchase, But if we look precisely at the target market, they do have some similarity in their demographics and as per many marketers they do have similar psycho graphics but which it the major point of concern of this article.
Segmentation generally divides a population based on variables. Thus demographic segmentation too has its own variables such as Age, gender, family size, income, occupation, religion, race and nationality.
Demographic segmentation is one of the most commonly used forms of segmentation as it is clearly identifiable. The variables used for Demographic segmentation help divide a large population into specific customer groups.
Each and every individual has an age, gender, income etc. Thus for mass marketing, this becomes one of the best ways to diversify individuals. This also helps in analyzing lots of data in shorter time for market research as well as for promotions.
The article is a guest contribution by Mr Pawankumar who is the campaign manager at experience commerce digital agency and is executing the campaign on the True snexy – A reality show with your favourite snack.
Reality shows may be the order of the day but have you ever come across a reality show that has your everyday snacks, in sensational new avatars, slugging it out to become India’s Most Loved Snack?
Mumbai’s Digital Agency, Experience Commerce, has taken the concept of reality shows to a whole new level! They have organised India’s first snack reality show “THE HUNT FOR THE TRUE SNEXY” on their website http://www.snexy.in.
With more than 11,000 facebook members and massive traffic on the website, the Hunt for India’s True Snexy is seriously heating up! “7 snacks fight it out over a period of 15 days and 5 rounds to win the title of the True Snexy, i.e. India’s most loved snack”, explains Sandip Maiti, CEO, Experience Commerce Digital Agency.
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