Market

is a group of potential customers with similar needs who are willing to exchange something of value with sellers offering various good or services

- ways of satisfying those needs

Generic Market

is a market with broadly similar needs - and sellers offering various, often diverse, ways of satisfying those needs

Product Market

a market with very similar needs and sellers offering various close subsitute ways of satisfying those needs

Market Segmentation

a two step process

1. naming broad product-markets

2. segmenting these broad product-markets in order to select target markets and devlop suitable marketing mixes

Segmenting

as an aggregating process - clustering people with similar needs into a "market segment"

- Market Segment: a relatively homogeneous group of customers who will respond to a marketing mix in a similar way

Single Target Market Approach

segmenting the market and picking of of the homogeneous segments as the firm's target market

Multiple Target Market Approach

segmenting the market and choosing two or more segments, and then treating each as a separate target market needing a different marketing mix

Combined Target Market Approach

combining two or more submarkets into one larger target market as a basis for one strategy

Combiners

try to increase the size of their target markets by combining two or more sgmetns

- look for similarities among various submarkets rather than differences

- extend or modify their basic offering to appeal to these "combined" customers with just one marketing mix

Segmenters

aim at one or more homogeneous segments and try to develop a different marketing mix for each segment

- have different marketing mixes for each target market

Qualifying Dimensions

are those relevant to including a customer type in a product-market

- what the customer is expects to get with the product they are buying

Determining Dimensions

are those that actually affect the customer's purchase of a specific product or brand in a product-market

- a car with heated seats vs. the similar car without

Clustering Techniques

try to find similar patterns within sets of data

- groups customers who are similar on their segmenting dimensions into homogeneous segments

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

the seller fine-tunes the marketing effort with information from a detailed customer database

- includes data on past purchases as well as other segmenting information

Positioning

refers to how customers think about proposed or present brands in a market

- repositioning a product can mean changing in physically or simply changing its image based on promotion