Marketing strategy for Snickers: segmentation, positioning, and differentiation

Snickers

Market segmentation is the art of dividing the market own into different parts. For Snickers, the company sells to a lot of different segments. It is important, therefore to understand which segments are the most potentially lucrative for this new marketing strategy. Segments can be done on the basis of age, race, gender, income level, education level, geographic location or any number of other variables. These different groups can also be segmented on the basis of homogeneity (common traits), distinction (what makes them different from each other) and reaction (how they react to the product).

Snickers sells bars to a lot of people, so it uses multiple marketing campaigns depending on what audience it wants to reach. In this case, the company is going to try a little ethnic marketing, to the Chinese community, which represents segmentation along language lines, since there is no overlap between people who speak a Chinese language and people who do not understand any. The reason is that the company believes peanuts have particular appeal to this group, and since there are millions of people of Chinese descent in North America, it wants to test out this campaign idea. The campaign will be rolled out in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Toronto and Vancouver. These are four major markets for Chinese-descended people. Moreover, these markets have many who still speak or read either Mandarin or Cantonese. These markets have the potential for more profits because to this point they have not been specifically targeted by the company in their own language -- Mars feels that it can increase sales to North American Chinese.

To reach this market, the message must convey a value proposition. A value proposition is what the product or service offers the customer. This can be some combination of capability, impact, proof or cost (Fankhauser, 2013). For example, consider the classic Snickers tag line "packed with peanuts, Snickers really satisfies." This tagline offers the peanuts as a trait, but the value proposition is in the satisfaction (of hunger).

Thus, Snickers could offer itself as a low cost way to get a snack, it could offer itself as a meal replacement or energy bar, or some other attribute. In this case, Snickers should pursue the value proposition of being a tasty peanut-based bar. This is an impact, because the peanut character is the overwhelming attribute. The marketing will be different because it will emphasize the fact that Snickers is a peanut-based snack. The snack part is less important for this campaign than the peanut part.

As a result, the campaign itself could focus on peanut imagery, or other emphasis on the peanut characteristic, since that is what is being sold. . The pedigree of the peanuts that the company uses could be used as a value proposition, meaning that Snickers is a great way to eat peanuts, but also that the peanuts used in Snickers are of very high quality, perhaps implying that other peanut snacks use lesser peanuts.

The peanut is a competitive advantage in this case. There are many snacks out there, but for a target market that has a special fondness for the peanut, it is that ingredient that is the most important competitive advantage -- the ads should basically rule out the passivity that anybody would even want a non-peanut snack.