Week 7: Reading Reflection (Rediscovering Market Segmentation)

1). The most surprising thing to me was addressing the importance of a product or service to reveal customer expectations about price sensitivity, brand loyalty, and social status. When examining expectations in this way, decisions can be ranked on a spectrum as they did to from usage behavior to core beliefs such as switching brands to deciding where to live.

2). The most confusing part to me was why certain demographic initiatives have failed. Although I understand that many of these work well in theory and that not all of this can be perfectly applied in the real world, extensive research has been done on the subject and three main areas have been identified. With these failures known, I would think it would be easier to learn from past mistakes and continuing research to continuously improve demographic initiatives.

3). My first question would be to explain in further detail the section differentiating segmentations to develop advertising and new products. I understand that there are some differences, but it seems that they are almost unrelated based on the charts and explanations, so I think further clarification would be helpful to someone new to the subject. My second question would be why there was a shift from demographic traits to nondemographic traits when developing marketing strategies? It goes into some sights research from a 1964 study, but it doesn’t go into detail as to why this shift occurred.

4). There is nothing that I disagree with from this article. He seems to back up all of his research and even provides additional readings at the end. By breaking the information down into informational subheadings and charts, he also does a good job of chunking the information so it is easy to grasp the concepts.