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Marketing Term Paper
Sean Gamble

When deciding to write this term paper, I had a lot of topics to choose from that were both interesting and exciting. In the end, I decided to right this term paper on identifying market segments and targets. I found this subject in the course by far the most interesting of any topic covered. In the research that I conducted, I noticed many similarities in all the texts that I read. In this paper I am going to explain what a market segment is, and then I am going to explain on how to target a certain segment for a particular product.
When looking at a market segment, we need to identify what one is, Joe Marconi in his book Creating the Marketing experience defines market segments as “Aggregating perspective buyers into groups that have common needs and will respond similarly to a certain marketing action.” He further explains that market segments are relative homogenous collection of potential buyers. This was the best definition that I found for this term. Once you have identified what the market segment is, you now need to follow steps to get it into practice.
There are five basic steps as outlined in his book. Step one consists of grouping possible consumers into segments that should have similar characteristics to each other and respond similar to marketing actions like a new product or price. This is the basic step in getting to know your potential target audience. As George Moschis write in his book Marketing Strategies for a Mature Market, “marketing segmentation at this point stresses two things, grouping people or organizations according to similarities of needs and benefits desired, and needs and benefits must be related to specific tangible

marketing actions.” Without following this step could result in a complete failure of the whole marketing plan.
The second step consists of putting products that have similar characteristics into groups. This step allows the marketer to have a better understanding...