Student Corner - 261

BEHAVIOUR SEGMENTATION IN MARKETING

Marketing is essential for a business to sustain itself, the major reason being it helps convert the products or services into revenue. The significance of revenue is too well-known to discuss.  We have seen how marketing campaigns of the company immensely benefit by segmentation. Major benefit is minimizing wastage of resources of the company by helping focus rightly on the target and the needs of the target; in other words, the company moves on the right path of satisfying the customer. Satisfaction of the customer with your product is a major factor that retains, helps retain the customer.  We know the acquisition of a new customer though necessary is rather very expensive compared with the retention of the customer. 

In our last session, we briefly looked into the geographical segmentation; we will now move on to some other segmentation.  The most complicated and at the same time most significant is Behavioural segmentation.

  The marketing strategy tries to focus on the behaviour of the customer particularly in terms of his or her relationship with your product or service. One’s behaviour is subject to endless influences and one of the major influence on man in general is craze for social recognition. The greatest source of social recognition has always been the power of money. To cut the long story short, affordability is something the marketing personnel consider it in deep. Affordability means how much the customer can spend on your products and on other products which necessarily include food, clothes and shelter, the primary three things. The money he has left with him or her after having spent reasonably on the three things is what is called disposable income for products..If it is possible for one to live within his affordability, it will be life of ease without any conflict of any kind. But it has not been found possible for man for various reasons, the major one being desire for social recognition.

You want to be recognised by the society and the society ever recognizes the moneyed. So you want to have money. Your interactions of all kinds take you to the people and to things; people you interact with watch you and you know it. Therefore you start interacting with them according to their expectations. Again, expectation is a difficult thing to understand and master.  But we know some general qualities that go into the expectations. In a way, they seem to be good for social progress. Let us see how they do good.

The very world of marketing lives on expectations. Everyone is nowadays exposed to ever growing dynamic social living on all levels. Take for example the food. You are informed about the benefits of so many kinds of food prepared using many ingredients. Your ads, both visual and the print, keep banging on you these benefits. You find many people around you resorting to such food habits and you feel rather unhappy if you do not take the same style of living.  At last, the ads win over you and you move on to those things you are exposed to even though as it is you cannot afford them.  Here comes the marketing success. The marketing campaign has influenced your food habits. In other words, your behaviour is controlled and guided by the marketing. This is behavioural segmentation.

We will go rather some deep into this in our next.