“Marketing shouldn’t feel like marketing. It should feel like a story.” — Jim Signorelli

Apple Marketing

A young man asked an old rich man how he made his money.

The old guy fingered his expensive wool vest and said, “Well, son, it was 1932. The depth of the Great Depression. I was down to my last nickel. Marketing was the key to my success.”

“I invested that nickel in an apple. I spent the entire day polishing the apple and, at the end of the day, I sold the apple for 10 cents.”

“The next morning, I invested those ten cents in two apples. I spent the entire day polishing them and sold them at 5:00 pm for 20 cents. I continued this system for a month, by the end of which I’d accumulated a fortune of $9.80.”

“Then a relative died and left me two million dollars.”

— (www.massmailsoftware.com/blog/marketing-jokes-and-funny-stories/)

Marketing

was once very simple. Henry Ford is reputed to have said in reference to the Model T Ford automobile, “The customer can have it in any colour he wants, as long as it’s black!”

How times have changed!

Even though it may seem simplistic, the core of marketing may be reduced to segmenting the market, targeting the chosen segment(s) and then employing the appropriate marketing mix to get your product/service into the hands of the consumers in the targeted segment(s).

Master that and you are on your way to becoming a marketing guru! OK…let me hastily pacify the successful marketing practitioners. Of course, nearly any endeavour may be reduced to fairly simplistic points like I just did — but the trouble is in the actual execution.

There is this example of this young computer programmer (they now call them ‘developers’) involved in a team that wrote computer programs for a client. Later it became known that a key member of the client company completed a course in the same programming language used by the programming company. This was quite disconcerting to the young programmer who, in turn, proclaimed to one of the programming managers “Miss Brown has now become a programmer!” (hinting that the company may soon lose the work of building the programs for them).

The manager wisely set the young programmer at ease with the statement, “Miss Brown has learnt the programming language, but that does not say she has become a programmer!” Similarly, learning marketing does not necessarily make one a marketer!

So, let us pick up back our argument. Segmentation may sound simple, but as a matter of fact, segmenting a market is now much more complex than it used to be, as noted in this pithy comment by Forsyth et al, “the wild proliferation of brands and channels in rapidly globalising markets now flusters even the most sophisticated marketers. In this environment, how should your sales force tailor its strategies to its accounts? Different customers have different attitudes, needs and preferences, but the old distinctions no longer take you very far. What should you be looking at today? The current purchasing behaviour of your customers? The benefits they seek to obtain? Demographics…?”

Before we get too far, let us formally define market segmentation. According to Kotler and Armstrong, it is “the division of a market into distinct groups of buyers who have different needs, characteristics, or behaviours and who might require separate products or marketing mixes.”

According to

BusinessDictionary.com the objective of market segmentation is to design a marketing mix that precisely matches the expectations of customers in the targeted segment. Few companies are big enough to supply the needs of an entire market; most must breakdown the total demand into segments and choose those that the company is best equipped to handle.”

Markets may be segmented based on any of several different criteria like geography, demography, psychography, or behaviour of consumers.

In your quest to segment your market properly, there are many ways that you may make some mistakes. Gavett in the 2014 article, ‘What You Need to Know about Segmentation’ mentioned myths to avoid:

Companies Rarely Create a Segment

Typically, they uncover various segments afterwards! Many companies review their customer data, sometimes with the help of customer relationship management (CRM) software, and discover the customer segments. A financial organisation may realise that there are some customers that are only transactional and only use the institution for cashing their weekly cheques (yes — people still get cheques and cash them!) or if their salary is deposited, they may do two or three withdrawals during the ensuing week and always maintain a low balance.

The organisation may place these customers into one segment and derive a particular strategy to meet their particular needs. There may be some customers that maintain high balances and detest, or hardly have the time to join long lines for certain services. They may also be segmented and a different strategy developed to meet their needs. For ease of reference, these different segments may even be given names, which may only be known by internal staff members of the organisation.

Segmentation and Demographics are Different Things

Two people may be Jamaican citizens, of the same age group and live in Ironshore, St James. One may be an international athlete and the other is a CEO. They must be marketed to differently!

You Need to Know Why You want to Segment

According to Gavett, “But before you even start the segmentation, you need to really understand why you’re doing it and what some of the actions are that you’re planning to take, based on what you think you might see. It helps you understand what’s actionable in terms of driving a company’s business.”

Dr Kenroy Wedderburn is an MBA part-time lecturer. Send your e-mails to drkwedderburn@gmail.com.