Just need a reply to a discussion post.

My post:

The companies named had different research needs. For instance, Kraft wanted to do a marketing study on Ritz because they tried to understand the best product to produce as well as to introduce in the market. They also wanted to establish the difference between cracker and chip as well as customers prevalence on these products. McDonald researched to develop the variety of fast food customers. McDonald’s primary interest for the research was to establish market segment and explore the attractiveness of each market segment. It also aimed at determining the best position. Sodexho’s study focused on creating metrics aimed at gender diversity as well as establishing the benefits of employing and developing as well as retaining women in the workforce. Thermos being a totally different industry had different research needs. Thermos used demographic and psychographic segmentation to develop their product depending on the needs and lifestyles of different consumer groups.

Looking at the Nike website we can see that demographic segmentation is a factor they used to target women’s from all around the world and the psychographic factor obviously being the lifestyle needs of different women. It seems like Nike does not target their costumers based on race, ethnicity or social standing because we can see women’s from different parts of the world.

My friends post ( i need to reply to this post agreeing with him)

I agree completely with Samuel in that McDonald’s main segmentation strategy would be demographic segmentation. In the video they specifically mention that what makes their marketing team different from other corporate marketing teams is that they have a representative for each cultural demographic. Geography of course is one important aspect of marketing, but that was not the focus of this video. Now in the video that they provided for us only mentioned McDonald’s marketing operations in the USA. Obviously, McDonald’s is an international company, and I imagine that their international STP strategy is much more complex than the one presented in this video.

Now Thermos definitely is using psychographic segmentation as a primary marketing strategy. They conducted numerous surveys that specifically asked questions about the customer’s specific wants and needs so that they could tailor their product specifically for that. They are not specifically marketing to people based off of cultural values, but they are segmenting the market based off of customer need that transcends culture. Their strategy focuses on how customers view themselves, and is not necessarily based off of age or ethnicity. At no point in the video did they use terms like “18-34 Male” or “African-Americans”. Instead, they used terms like “Commuters” or “Fashionistas”.

Kraft is an interesting case because they were looking to introduce a product that was going to bring in more volume of customers as opposed to offering more variations of products that were already offered. They also noticed that the chip market was growing twice as fast as crackers, so they introduced a cracker that was similar to a chip. In order to make a product that was the “best of both worlds” they had to conduct market research to find out what makes people like chips, and what makes people like crackers. Finding out these fundamental qualities allowed them to craft their new product and market it appropriately. Dunkin Donuts is a similar case in that they saw an opportunity to broaden the products they offered, and conducted market research to do so.