Talk:Target market/Archives/2018

Excessive Repetition and Lack of Focus

I have to agree with other comments on this Talk page that this article is "terrible" and "needs to be rewritten". This page not only repeats itself, over and over again (e.g. demographic, behavioural and psychographic segmentation is repeated no less than three times on this page) AND (differentiated/ undifferentiated marketing is mentioned multiple times), it repeats material that is already covered in the page on market segmentation. Surely, a link to market segmentation is all that is required?

A lot of material on this page is not focussed. Instead of drilling down and exploring the concept of a target market in detail, this page seems to want to broaden the scope and discuss segmentation approaches as well as marketing in general, including the history of the marketing concept. This pages desperately needs a strong focus on target markets and a big restructure to make the core themes stand out more clearly.

In addition, much of the material on this page treats target marketing as an advertising approach. This is incorrect - target marketing is a marketing approach - and it is concerned with developing the total marketing offering (product, price, place and promotion) with the needs of the target market in mind. The distinction between marketing and advertising gets lost somewhere in the middle and the discussion assumes and advertising focus.

I agree with other comments that the 'target audience' and 'target market' are different concepts. The 'target audience' refers to those members of a population that are exposed to marketing communications, while the 'target market' refers to those segments have been selected for special attention. While there may be considerable overlap between these two groups in practice, at least analytically they need to be treated as different. This distinction needs to be much more clearly articulated and this is a good place to do that. ( I would have thought that a Venn diagram could usefully distinguish between the two concepts).

Where to from here?

This page needs a major overhaul to remove repetitions, to focus on the core issue (target markets) and to make it more readable and more useful to readers without subject matter expertise.  Done

Terminology': Clarification of terminology (e.g. Purchasing for special occasions like weddings, etc is termed "opportunity" but in the marketing literature this is known as "usage occasion".  Done

Excessively long introduction The lead section contains detailed descriptions of bases for segmentation (demographic, geographic, pyschographic and behavioral) which are not only off topic, but are repeated twice further down the page.

Wikipedia's guideline is that the lead section should consist of approx 4 paragraphs, and should provide a brief explanation of the article's main themes in a way that would be understood by a lay reader. The current lead section consists of 12 paragraphs (three times longer than the guideline), five of which contain detailed descriptions of the segmentation bases. This level of detail is not warranted in a lead section. The discussion about bases for segmentation needs to be removed from the lead section, and should be integrated with the other discussions within the article, or deleted entirely. (I am reluctant to delete, because this lengthy discussion contains some ideas that are not canvassed elsewhere - therefore integration is to be preferred)  Done

Focus  Done

This page needs to develop a much stronger focus on the theme implied by the page's major heading, namely target markets. To differentiate this article from the nine other articles on Wikipedia that cover the concept of a target market, this page needs to maintain a strong focus on 'target markets' to the exclusion of other incidental concepts, and needs to drill down and take a deeper look at target market related issues. Instead of going off topic and discussing the marketing mix, the history of marketing, etc this page could devote itself to discussing:

• how marketers identify specific target markets
• criteria used to evaluate attractive (or profitable) target markets
• how marketers decide the optimal number of markets to enter
• the concepts of a primary and secondary target market
• concepts of target market and target audience (being careful to distinguish between the two concepts)
• concept of total addressable market (in Euler diagram, but never defined or dicussed)
• how target markets are profiled (e.g. attitudes and motivations, purchasing habits, media habits
• typical sources of information used to compile market profiles
• actual examples of target market profiles (especially those relevant to key brand advertisers and marketers) e.g. profile of a female grocery buyer, profile of a tech-savvy Millenial, profile of a young single, profile of a baby boomer etc

Errors of Fact/ Errors of Interpretation  Done

There are many errors of fact and/or errors of interpretation -too many to itemise separately. These need to be rectified urgently. Here follows a more detailed explanation of selected passages that either contain errors of fact, errors of interpretation (and in a few instances both errors of fact and errors of interpretation):

Section on the "First Emergence of the Marketing Mix" is problematic: What the article currently says: The 'emergence of the ‘marketing mix’ was claimed to be in 1965 by Borden'

Consensus view: First known mention of a marketers as 'mixers of ingredients' is attributed to Prof James Culliton as early as 1948 (Reference: Culliton, J. The Management of Marketing Costs, [Research Bulletin] Harvard University, 1948). Although Borden did not coin the term 'marketing mix' (he clearly gives credit to his colleague, James Culliton for this), Borden claims that he was instrumental in popularising the term because he began using it consistently from the late 1940s (Reference: Borden, N.H., "The Concept of the Marketing Mix," Journal of Advertising Research, 1964, pp 2-7 and reprinted in: Baker, M.J. (ed), Marketing: Critical Perspectives on Business and Management, Volume 5, Routledge, 2001, pp 3-4 and available online at Google Books

• • What the article currently says: "at this stage [1964] it [marketing] wasn’t split into the 4P's but instead it was just a few things that helped make up marketing (Rafiq & Ahmed, 1995)."

The consensus view: Although the idea of marketers as 'mixers of ingredients' caught on, there was no real consensus about what elements should be included in the mix. The 4 Ps, in its modern form (i.e., the marketing mix), was first proposed in 1960 by E. Jerome McCarthy in his text-book, Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach Irwin, Homewood, Ill., 1960. This is four years prior to the date specified in the article. Note that McCarthy used the 4 Ps as an organising framework for the entire work, so that it is not appropriate to cite specific page references for the 4Ps.  Done

• • What it currently says: "The 4P's were debated at length and then the theory of 8P's was suggested by Goldsmith (1999), the eight included product, price, place, promotion, participants, physical evidence, process and personalization.'" ::Consensus view: [A date of 1999 is arguably rather too late and in addition, it should be noted that the expanded marketing mix applies to services marketing rather than general marketing and that the debate about how many Ps to include is ongoing] The 7 Ps or 8 Ps first began to take shape at the inaugural AMA Conference dedicated to Services Marketing in 1981 where Booms and Bitner first suggested 7 Ps (See Booms, B. and Bitner, M. J. "Marketing Strategies and Organizational Structures for Service Firms" in James H. Donnelly and William R. George, (eds), Marketing of Services, Chicago: American Marketing Association, 47-51). Taken collectively, the papers presented at that conference indicate that service marketers were thinking about a revision to the general marketing mix based on an understanding that the nature of services required different tools and analyses. Since then there have been a number of different proposals for a service marketing mix. This suggests that the expanded marketing mix (regardless of whether you like 7 or 8Ps) evolved organically rather then being proposed by a single theorist. A useful reference for this discussion is Fisk, R.P., Brown, W. and Bitner, M.J., "Tracking the Evolution of Services Marketing Literature, Journal of Retailing, vol. 41, (April), 1993 and of course, the AMA Conference Proceedings.  Done

• • What the article currently says: "In the past, advertisers had tried to build brand names with television and magazines; however, advertisers have been using audience targeting as a new form of medium"

Comment: Seriously? Since when did an audience (a group of people) become a medium (a channel for communication e.g. TV, radio, magazines, social media)?????????? Total gibberish! Done

Reverse Segmentation There may be opportunities to discuss the trend towards 'reverse segmentation' on this page. Reverse segmentation is a segment-building approach rather than a market division approach. As I understand it, reverse segmentation begins with a profile of a single purchaser and then seeks to build a segment by identifying other individuals with similar profiles. I lack the expertise in this area to write a fair account of it. If there is someone out there with this expertise, contributions or comments would be most welcome. Done

Overall framework This page needs someone with expertise in the subject area to provide an overall organising framework (an architecture for the page) - i.e., a list of headings and sub-headings that could serve as a guide for prospective contributors and help them to make decisions about where to place new content. In addition, an organising framework would help to give the page a more logical progression, help to establish the focus and assist in minimising future repetitions. I have suggested topics in this section, but other editors may have different ideas which are equally compelling.

If this article cannot be fixed, it should be merged with market segmentation (which already has some support on this talk page)

(talk) 01:09, 18 October 2016 (UTC)

Duplication

Here is a list of articles on Wikipedia that duplicate material or concepts canvassed in this article:

Very broad level of duplication

Market segmentation (main page)

Segmenting and positioning

Marketing#market segmentation

Market analysis#market segmentation

Positioning (marketing)#segmentation

Partial duplication of selected content in:

Attitudinal targeting

Behavioral targeting

Demographic targeting

Demographic profile

Geodemographic segmentation

Geo-targeting

Mass marketing

Microsegment

Niche market

Precision marketing

Product differentiation

Psychographics

Serviceable available market

Targeted advertising

Target audience

Total addressable market

Values Modes

So, there are 5 articles that cover market segmentation and duplicate this article entirely, many of them give a far more lucid and coherent treatment of the concepts than can be found in this article. And, there are an additional 17 articles that cover at least one aspect of this article. There is no real need for a separate article on target markets as it is duplicated elsewhere multiple times. Given that this article is so poorly written, lacks focus, does not really deal with the implied promise of title, I recommend that it be deleted. BronHiggs (talk) 22:58, 29 May 2017 (UTC)

Update: Restructure and overhaul

This article has been overhauled and reorganised to provide much greater focus on the targeting decision.

• four highly repetitive sections on market segmentation have been collapsed into a single section (with the addition of a link to the article on Market segmentation for the benefit of those who want to learn more about the step in the process that precedes targeting
• the S-T-P approach has been introduced to provide a conceptual framework for the targeting decision, and an organising structure for the article
• Definitions of the target market have been added
• a new section on the targeting decision has been added - this includes a brief discussion of widely-used methods for the targeting decision, plus a short section on targeting in international markets
• a new section on positioning has been added (also with a link to the article on Positioning (marketing)
• the remaining sections have been reworked to put the spotlight on the relationship between the heading and the target market
• wherever applicable, new concepts have been integrated into the discussion
• many new wikilinks have been integrated into the discussion
• a number of new references have been added to support the content in the expanded discussion
• the tag "repetitive and disorganised" has been removed

Issues outstanding

I still feel that the section on the marketing mix is overly long and contains an excessive level of detail. Much of this could be deleted without any real loss of value. All that is needed is a brief commentary which illustrates how the marketing mix relates to the target market AND a link to the article on the marketing mix

Some topics - such as behavioural targeting, location-based targeting and reverse segmentation could be expanded with detailed explanations and the addition of new references.

The Euler diagram which shows the total addressable market remains poorly integrated within the article and could use a bit more attention

BronHiggs (talk) 23:42, 14 October 2018 (UTC)