Assume you are the Director of Design for a cell phone manufacturing company. You work closely with the New Product Development Department. You are in the earliest stages of determining what your next cell phone product line should look like. Clearly, in designing the new phone, you need to know who the target customers will be. There are a range of potential customers: young vs. old, affluent vs. modest income, heavy users vs. light users, technology lovers vs. technophobes, etc. It doesn’t make sense to begin designing the new cell phone until you have identified what market segment you wish to address.

For this assignment: 1. Identify different important market segments that you need to consider.

2. Which of these segments can be treated as “mainstream” segments and which as “niche” segments?

3. Create a template form that shows the different categories of customer traits that will help you to define different market segments.

4. Select one market segment, and describe in one or two paragraphs what features the cell phone might have in order to be attractive to this segment.

Target length of the assignment: 2-4 pages