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HOW TO DEMOGRAPHICALLY AND GEOGRAPHICALY SEGMENT THE MARKET FOR EFFECTIVE ADVERTISING AND PROMOTION.

Written by: Francis Kamau

Article Overview: I have talked about segmenting the market before, but it does not hurt to repeat. This is because segmenting your market makes you focus on what you want to do for your business and what is your target market profile. This is by understanding which market segments you are going to attack and which ones you are going to ignore. Segmenting the market is a step by step process, but before be get to that process we need to understand two different ways that we can segment the market for business development as well as for advertisement, promotions and community social responsibility.

HOW TO DEMOGRAPHICALLY AND GEOGRAPHICALY SEGMENT THE MARKET FOR EFFECTIVE ADVERTISING AND PROMOTION.

I have talked about segmenting the market before, but it does not hurt to repeat. This is because segmenting your market makes you focus on what you want to do for your business and what is your target market profile. This is by understanding which market segments you are going to attack and which ones you are going to ignore.

Segmenting the market is a step by step process, but before be get to that process we need to understand two different ways that we can segment the market for business development as well as for advertisement, promotions and community social responsibility.

Let’s talk about these two simple market segmentation types, the demographic and geographical segmentation.

Let’s imagine that we have a room with 100 customers and we are in the business of marketing perfumes. Let’s imagine that all the 100 people are customers of perfume and they are a representative sample of the entire market.

Let’s use gender to segment the market; here we will segment using male and females. This will be done by asking how many customers are females and step on one side, and then we will literally count them each group. Let’s say that we find that 50% of the people are females while the other 50 % are males. If you want to target your perfume to males then you have 50 customers in that room who are representative of the entire market, this means that in your perfume market you have 50% prospective customers. That is a demographic segmentation based on gender.

Another segmentation process is by breaking the market by the ages as follows:
Below 19 years – 0%
19 – 20 years – 20%
21 – 30 years – 35%
31 – 40 years - 25%
Above 40 years – 0%
This is done by asking the following question, which of the following age groups do you belong? Have a multiple choice answer broken down to various age groups. Alternatively you can group the ages yourself. Based on this social class segmentation, we have 3 age segments, so you can target your perfume based on these three target groups.

Let’s go further and segment the market based on social economic groupings:
Upper Class 30%
Middle Class 30%
Lower class 10%
Social class is determined by residence, income and occupation.
Based on this, we can say the market has opportunities for three products, one for upper, middle and lower classes.

Other demographics segmentation includes, race, religion and ethnicity. Some marketers have been including geographical segmentation to demographic segmentation but I like dealing with geographic segmentation on its own.

The key in any business communicating, promotion and advertising using demographics segmentation is to use the target demographics customer to communicate. This means that even if you want to carry out any social responsibility activity, remember your target market and carry out activities that will be for benefits of that specific target.

Geographic segmentation is basically using the spatial location to segment the market; a good example is when people say this product for Europe market as opposed to Africa market and the like. With these days of globalization, geographical segmentation becomes important because for one to communicate advertise and promote to the global market one must either have specific communication for different geographical markets or one communication that cuts across the entire global market.

Having one communication, advertisement, promotion and community social responsibility for the global market is difficult, this is because of different cultural background, history, economic differences, social among other disparities. In my marketing experience, I have seen an advertisement liked by one market and disliked and churned by religious leaders of another market.

While segmenting and advertising globally, key thing to note is that for the global market, the advertisements, promotions and other business communications must be localized to fit each specific market.

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  EXAMINE YOUR ALTERNATIVES BEFORE YOU ADVERTISE
  WHEN YOU EXPAND YOUR PRODUCT LINE, WHERE I WOULD START?
  Where I would start expanding your product line!

Article Tags: 19 years, advertisement, age groups, age segments, business development, demographic segmentation, females, market profile, market segmentation, market segments, multiple choice, perfume, perfumes, promotions, prospective customers, representative sample, segment, social responsibility, target market, two different ways



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