What are the 4 main segments e-marketers use to define their target market?
March 1, 2009 – 6:20 pm- Psychographic: when assessing the personality trait, certain values, lifestyle, activities, interest, and opinions. Some variables could be a persons Values towards the internet or specific activities that they are interested in such as Snowboarding. A company such as Burton that is looking to market their snowboards needs to understand both the demographic and psychographic of the market that they are trying to acquiring in their multi-segmented targeting strategy.
- Demographic: This form is used to find out who is the ideal user of the product/service that is being offered according the their ethnicity, education and income within the marketplace that they are targeting. Some variables might include millenials (youth who were born in the internet age), Ethnic Groups (Hispanics are said to have a 59% internet adoption rate and view more websites frequently then average web user)
- Geographic: This form of segmentation is used when targeting specific cities, regions, states, or countries. This form of segmentation is important for product distribution strategy. For example, the Toronto Star will base their target market segmentation to consumers with certain psychographic/behavior in the geographic area of GTA.
- Behavior: This form takes into account the way a consumer reacts to various aspects of the online world such as shopping or playing online games. Two commonly used behavioral segmentation variables are benefits sought and product usage. Marketers using benefit segmentation often form groups of consumers based on the benefits they desire from they product.
- Variables that can be used for these segments are benefit segmentation: When marketers design products based on the benefits that the user is seeking, they are able to be more practical. The benefits sought is the key driver of marketing mix strategy.
- Usage Segments: when finding out how the consumer is accessing the internet (through which medium). I.E. Accessing from home vs. work, time spent online, receiving device (PDA, PC, etc.).
