Target Marketing Process

Target marketing involves the identification of the needs and wants of specific groups of customers and tailoring the marketing mix according to their needs. This process leads to a more homogeneous grouping of potential customers, which allows the marketer to develop more precise strategies designed to reach them.

Once the marketers have identified who they want to target, these potential customers are grouped based on their similarities in terms of needs and/or behaviors that are likely to cause them to respond similarly to marketing actions. This breaking up of the market is referred to as the market segmentation process.

After developing the segments, the marketers face a few decision points regarding the target market:

• Ignore the segment differences and develop one marketing mix for the entire market (undifferentiated marketing).
• Design different marketing mixes for several different segments (differentiated marketing).
• Simply concentrate efforts on one specific segment in an attempt to capture a large share of that market (concentrated marketing).

Finally, the marketer decides on the positioning strategy. Positioning refers to arranging your product in a way to occupy a clear and distinctive place in customers’ minds in comparison to competing products (i.e., BMW means luxury car and will not be confused with a Ford).  Positioning may be done by product attributes, price, quality, user and/or cultural symbols, etc.