ABSTRACT
Market segmentation strategies are rooted in marketers’ attempts to understand complex and diverse marketplaces. Market segmentation brings a semblance of order, whereby marketers take the heterogeneous demand characteristics of a market and assign them to a number of smaller groups that share similar characteristics. It is a recognition that while markets are diverse, there are subgroups within a market that share the same wants and needs. Segmentation is an important step in a marketer’s ability to meet these different needs in the marketplace.
Market segmentation is a process in marketing strategy where marketers differentiate customers that share similar characteristics into unique target market groups within a marketplace. Rather than treat a market as an undifferentiated whole, marketers use market segmentation to identify different need-based segments within a market. After marketers select viable market segments, the next step in the process is to identify a target market, which is a group of customers that have specific wants and needs and also a willingness to buy.
