Make Marketing History

The views of a marketing deviant.

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Secondary Segmentation.

In our commodified world there are huge numbers of product categories that the majority of people consume. If you're competing in those markets, it makes little sense to focus on the traditional socio-demographic divisions. That's what everybody does.

You have a great number of potential customers out there so why not choose your own demographic within that mass market and speak to them about your product. Focus on what they do beyond being consumers within your product category. For example - most people drink beer, so focus on gardeners who drink. That way you can generate small but deeper engagements, lengthening attentions spans and true loyalty.

And you don't have to limit yourself to just one of these secondary segments - you can approach as many as you like via a variety of messaging that is linked by a consistent tone of voice. Become niche marketers of a commodity category and you are assured of talking to potential customers. If you just pursue a niche market, there may not be any customers in it.

2 Comments:

Blogger andreea said...

Funny, we were just talking about that in uni the other day - it's a nice idea in theory but I remember when we wanted to actually try it, it didn't work out as planned. It might be ok with vast market segments like you gave the example of beer drinkers but then you just run into a lot of other problems (speaking from the agency's point of view, which is what we experimented):
a) client doesn't have enough money to do it
b) client doesn't have enough time c) client doesn't want to compete with other products that are deeply rooted into consumers' habits

etc. :(

But in theory it's nice, apart from the fact that the client will like it 'easy' and will want to talk to as many as possible, it'll take a while before this 'second segmentation' takes place

11:46 PM, December 11, 2007  
Blogger john dodds said...

Hi Andrea

My reaction to that would be

1) you don't have to spend a lot of money to do it - just get yourself oput of the advertising mindset.

2) there's always competition, any business that thinks it has a competition-free zone is deluding itself.

2:04 AM, December 12, 2007  

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