Target marketing strategies and consumer segmentation

Target Marketing

The author of this report has been asked to select and review an article on target marketing. According to the Entrepreneur.com website, there are several important facets and parts of targeting marketing that make it a very viable and effective to market products and services. The author of this response will explain what the etymology of the term is and how it all works. While target marketing may seem dull to many people, the method is extremely current and modern and pays major dividends when done correctly.

As the name would imply, targeting marketing is based on identifying and exploiting a target market. Some of the questions that someone should ask when doing this would include whether target customers are male or female, how old they are, where they live, what they do for a living, how much money they earn in a year and what other aspects of their lives will be common threads found in many to most of the people that would buy the product or service in question. It is important to be as specific and focused as possible when it comes to answering these questions. In the past, an answer like "18 to 49-year-olds" would work but that is far from the case nowadays given the barrage of advertising that people experience and just how focused target markets have become today in the current marketing paradigm (Entrepreneur.com, 2016).

Even traditional marketing mainstays are not what they used to be. For example, it may make complete sense to market Geritol to baby boomers that are in the 50+ age set but many of those people still prefer to "rock and roll." Similarly, there are many 30-year-olds that are boomerang kids and are still living with their parents. Generational marketing, which is what that basically would be, is still viable in many forms. Even so, a better and more precise way to do it is cohort marketing. This is the idea of marketing based on what a group of people did in their formative years. Just as one example, what baby boomers went through in their formative years is quite different than what millennials are going through right now (Entrepreneur.com, 2016).

Conclusion