ABSTRACT
Demarketing can be defined as the deliberate attempt by marketers to reduce demand for a product by using the same tools and techniques as are normally used to increase demand. At first, this appears to be a contradiction: to the lay person, and indeed to many marketers, the purpose of marketing is to increase demand, whether from the same group of customers or from new customers recruited to the firm’s loyal group of regular users. The emphasis in segmentation theory is always on satisfying the needs of a specific group of customers, presumably all with similar characteristics, but the frame of this picture is too small – it fails to show the far greater number of customers who are being excluded. Demarketing seeks to reduce demand for a product, sometimes overall, sometimes from ‘undesirable’ customers, and sometimes at specific times. This is the flipside of segmentation.
