Purpose-To assess your ability to:

Establish a segmentation profile for a primary market of a product.

Recommend a targeting strategy.

Graph positions of competitors.

Overview

As you will have read in your textbook for this week, efficient marketing requires the segmenting of consumer markets into distinct groups, targeting those groups, and positioning your product in the consciousness of the targeted segments. Consider the fact that as a small business, your services will not appeal to everyone equally. How are you going to make the most efficient use of your advertising budget? This week you will work this out as you outline your STP strategy in a one page brief.

Action Items

Using the five bases discussed on pages 133 and 134, describe the different segments of the market you plan to target. Are they young or older? Male or female? Married or single? Adventurous or cautious? Frequent travelers or those who travel only occaisionally? What about groups with special or specific needs?

Next, describe how you will target each of these different market segments. Assume that you will not use an undifferentiated marketing strategy. What will you do differently to reach the different groups you've identified in the previous section?

In this last section, assume that you have conducted the research you planned in last week's assignment. Identify two criteria you expect to be important to customers for your type of establishment. Using those criteria, construct a perceptual map similar to that found on page 140 of your textbook. In addition to locating your future business on this map, place the three competitors you used for the Value Proposition and Mapping Brief in Week 4. In a paragraph, explain why you've located yourself and your competitors the way you have on your perceptual map.