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According to Kerin (2003) market segmentation is a process of dividing the total market for a good or service into smaller, internally homogenous groups.
The online media does offer a tremendous advantage of selectivity over traditional mass vehicles of advertising, sales promotion and public relations, and the Web is powerful both in delivering messages to a large audience via browsers and banner advertising or in delivering the message to esoteric, low profile listervs.�? (Reedy and Schullo, 2004, p.77)
Since internet marketing can reach such diversified audience, broad or narrow, segmenting becomes as an important element in internet advertising. There are several of different criteria’s marketer’s uses to segment their audiences. The most common criteria’s is; geographical, demographic, behavioural and psychographic.
Geographical: is by geographical location, such as continent, country, city or rural. (Mohammed, Fisher, Jaworski and Cahill, 2002, p89)
Demographics: focuses on the costumers’ age, sex, income, education, job and cultural/ethnic background. For example a website like Bacardi.com may be targeted people aged 18-30, income over 20 000$ a year who are Caucasians.
Behavioural: is based on actual behaviour, such as online/offline shopping behaviour, web-usage, website loyalty and prior purchases. (Mohammed, Fisher, Jaworski and Cahill, 2002, p89)
Psychographics: is an analysis of the way an individual or group choose to live their lives (Groucutt and Griseri, 2004, p114) this will focus on their social class, lifestyle, type and personality. (Groucutt and Griseri, 2004, p114)
The thing that makes online segmentation special from traditional segmentation is as Lerer (2002, as sited in Groucutt and Griseri, 2004, p115) suggest that the internet allows for ‘real time’ segmentation of customers. This can be done trough online questioners, click stream analysis and simple screening questions. (Lerer, 2002, as sited in Groucutt and Griseri, 2004, p115)
For a market segment to be useful to marketers it should meet some certain criteria;
(McGraw, p56)
“Once a company has selected the most appropriate segments for its product and/or service, it needs to develop a strategy to target its specific audience(s).�?( Groucutt and Griseri, 2004, p115) The company then selects the most appropriate way to target the audience. Online this can be done by for example; e-mail, banner advertising or viral marketing.
Positioning on the internet and in general marketing refers to how your company/products and/or service are perceived by the customers. (Cox and Koelzer, 2004, p28). For example some customers may use e-bay over graysonline.com.au because they believe that e-bay is safer and more reliable.
Kerin, R.A. (2003) Marketing, Sydney : McGraw-Hill,c2003.
Reedy, J. and Schullo, S. (2004) Electronic marketing : integrating electronic resources into the marketing process, Mason, Ohio : Thomson/South-Western.
Cox, B. and Koelzer, W. (2004) Internet marketing, Upper Saddle River, N.J. : Pearson/Prentice Hal.
Mohammed, R.A., Fisher, R.J., Jaworski, B.J, and Cahill, M.A. (2002) Internet marketing : building advantage in the networked economy, Boston : McGraw-Hill.
Groucutt, J. and Griseri, P. (2004) Mastering e-business, Houndmills [England] ; New York : Palgrave Macmillan
Jorgen Ingwersen 15:31, 27 Oct 2005 (EST)
