Segmentation...

Dividing people into groups is a basic marketing process. This sentence might be a conclusion of friday’s lecture. It is professionally called SEGMENTATION. According to Smith (1957) is based on the observation of evolution of demand and represents a more precise and rational adaptation of the product and the marketing effort to meet customer or user demands. But I prefer simpler definition, as Ruth said it was finding out what different groups of people wantsAs we know marketers use tricks to find out many pieces of information about the customers.
The most often we are not even aware of the fact that we make our private data accessible with someone who can use it to gain its own objectives. People usually agree to fill in many anonymous questionnaires, which can be useful in creating customer profiles. There are many different profiles connected with age, gender, social class and even a hair colour. Next part of the lecture was as interesting as the previous one. We got to know that in Victorian times people needed only one product to clean floors, washing hair and children’s mouth. What is interesting, today, we do not need anything more than one product to clean. But we live in advertising and marketing era. Specialists can manipulate our brains and convince us that every single person need something different that others. As a result, we can find on the shelves thousands of hair products which are not necessary for us. It is only an artificial division created to gain profits from selling. Do we really think that women’s hair are different than men’s? No! But marketing experts attached us to this division.
Dividing people due to their gender is a great example of a process called STP marketing which helps to indicate a position of a product in market.
After a piece of theory we had a chance to use our knowledge in practice. We got three receipts from the biggest supermarkets. Our challenge was to recognize and draw a profile of a
person who bought products. I expected that I might be difficult but it was not. All groups were close to the truth.
To sum up, I enclose two relevant articles and a few photos and diagrams which can help you to understand a topic which I was writing about.