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Market Segmentation
The most important reason
for bringing in the marketing concept is to place the customer needs at
the centre of organisations decision making. The need to adopt this
approach stems from a number of factors, including increased
competition, better-informed and-educated customers and, most
importantly, changing patterns of demand. Basically it is this change in
patterns of demand that has given rise to the need to segment markets.
Market segmentation can be defined as the process of breaking down the
total market for a product or service into distinct sub-groups or
segments where each segment may conceivably represent a separate target
market to be reached with a distinctive marketing mix. Effective
segmentation is achieved when customers sharing similar patterns of
demand are grouped together and where each group or segment differs in
the pattern of demand from other segments in the market.
Segmentation Bases:
a) Geographic Segmentation
consists of dividing a country into regions. If the company is bigger
then, these larger regions are then broken down into areas with
individual regional manager controlling salespeople in distinct areas.
In international marketing, different countries may be deemed to
constitute different market segments. With the hair care products
geographic segmentation is quite important.
b) Demographic Segmentation
is done on the basis of various factors like age, sex, income and social
class, education, nationality, political, family size and family life
cycle. This is quite important for hair care products because different
types of people like different types of products at different stage of
their life.
c) Behavioural Segmentation
takes into account the behavioural pattern of the buyer. Buyers
generally have a constant buying habits. They generally buy the same or
the similar product and this can be used as the base of segmentation.
Such base include usage status,”light”, “medium” and ”heavy users”,
Brand loyalty status, where customer can be divided depending on their
loyalty to a product or a brand, Benefits sought, that determines the
principal expectation(s) that a purchaser is seeking from the product
and occasions for purchase.
d) Life Style or
Psychographics segmentation is based on the idea that individuals have
characteristic patterns of living that may be reflected in the products
and brands which they purchase.
This company producing hair
care products can segment itself in all different ways discussed above
just by slightly modifying the product for different target segments or
market.
Price can be used to
support the position of the range of hair care products.
Price is very important
part of the marketing mix. The four P’s , Price, Product , Promotion and
Place are the four wheels of effective marketing. All four of these
components are quite essential for the successful marketing. Among these
the price takes the priority. Pricing is quite important for Survival,
maximizing profit, maximizing market share, maximum market skimming,
product quality leadership. Determining demand, price sensitivity.
It is the price that
motivates the consumers to buy a particular product mostly in the case
of price sensitive products. Similarly price perceives the quality. It
is the assumption that cheap products are not good in quality and vice
versa. So price can help in positioning the product in a desired market.
Because of the various range of hair care products being produced
different price can be set for different range. This will help to
position the product in the market and create an image in the mind of
the consumer regarding the quality of the product.
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