The importance of understanding your consumers
The market targeting topic resembles very much with the popular social media meme: “You can’t please everybody out there, you’re not on Avocado”. Brands can’t connect with all customers in large, broad, or diverse markets, therefore, they need to identify the market segments they can connect and serve effectively. Brands need to understand consumer behavior and identify what makes each segment unique and different. Identifying the needs and sending the right message to the right consumer is the key to marketing success.
To obtain effective marketing, brands need to identify distinct groups of customers who differ in their needs and wants by performing a market segmentation. Since scattering the marketing efforts it’s not recommended, brands have to select one or more market segments to enter. For example, if you own a healthy food restaurant, chances are that your market target is fairly broad. In theory, everyone desires to eat healthy food. In practice, not everyone can have access to your location (geographical segmentation) and maybe not everyone can afford it (income segmentation).
Market segmentation divides a market into slices by looking at descriptive characteristics such as geographic, demographic, psychographic and behavioral segmentation. Moreover, you can divide your target audience by examining the different attitudes of your consumers such as professionals or blue collars. Regardless of which type of segmentation scheme the brands use, the secret is to adjust the marketing efforts to satisfy the customers’ differences.
Once you know the brand’s audience, you can begin to design a plan about how the brand will market the target audience and what type of message better fits the audience. If a business skips the targeting phase and uses the same message for everyone out there, half of the money is thrown out the window for the simple fact that it doesn’t apply to them. For any type of brand, having a focused and more effective strategy is the fastest way to a greater return on the marketing investment. As I mentioned in my previous articles, a deep analysis of the market penetration, targeted audience, product appealing, and competition is a must before launch.