Market Segmentation of Online Consumer

Final Project: Market Segmentation of Online Consumers

Name: Private

Class: Private

05/12/12

Market Segmentation of Online Consumers

A very wise professor once referred to the United States as being less of a proverbial melting pot and more like a stew pot. People are not all the same, and unique marketing strategies have to be designed to address the varied needs of consumers. However, even in a stew pot, there is not just one carrot shaving, one slice of onion, one bean, and one grain of salt – there are many. The job of online marketers is to recognize which consumers constitute the carrots, which consumers constitute the salt, and which consumers are simply not interested in being on a dinner plate.

Online Segment Market Groups and Strategies

Things used to be a lot simpler for businesses when their only competition was their neighbor. With the birth of the Internet and Internet shopping, these companies must now compete with the entire country, and sometimes even with the entire world. People no longer have to leave their homes to buy groceries, and organizing a wedding can be done with just a click of a computer mouse. But the groceries certainly don’t come out of the computer, and neither does a wedding dress. There are still real people and real businesses working very hard behind the ever-growing world of e-commerce.

With so much product variety on the market, it can be a daunting task for companies to make sure that their products are getting noticed by consumers. A strategy that is proven to be helpful in addressing this issue is called market segmentation. Market segmentation is a process that divides a market into distinct subsets of consumers with common needs and characteristics, and targets each segment with a distinct marketing mix (Schiffman, Kanuk, 2007). This process is also used in online marketing, and since the Internet provides a greater window of consumer exposure, it becomes that much more important to target...