Segmentation for Marketing Channel Design (Research Paper Sample)

Segmentation for Marketing Channel Design
The current business or market arena is dynamic and full of competition. In light of this, a company has to be careful especially when it comes to selecting the marketing channels for implementation. The design and or segmentation of a marketing channel must be paid close attention to for failure to do so may result in the failure of an enterprise. In order to fully understand the points to be postulated in the impending discourse, it is vital that an analysis of terms first be given. The first is marketing channel, which can be defined as a set of interdependent organizations, which come together so as to see that a product or service is available to the public at large for their use and or consumption. Last is market segmentation, which involves splitting the market into interdependent groups of end users (Coughlan, Anderson, Stern, & El-Ansary, 2006).With such a background, it is now viable to delve into a discourse which will analyze traditional product design segmentation and segmentation for marketing channel design.
Market segmentation is also known through another term, micromarketing. Market segmentation firstly is different from traditional product segmentation because it serves to further simplify the marketing process. This simplification is an advantage in that through it, marketers are now given room to concentrate more on advertising, especially to groups of consumers who share similar characteristics (Coughlan, Anderson, Stern, & El-Ansary, 2006). Marketing segmentation is also different in that it helps marketers when it comes to producing specific goods, and advertisements geared towards the identified segments of consumers. In the traditional product design segmentation, marketers did not have much leeway when it came to producing specific products and advertisements to go with such products for their segmented consumers. Traditionally, there existed a very general way of marketing which involved producing general advertising in the hopes that it would appeal to a general audience. With market segmentation, marketers can expect better results because their concentration is on one segment. The results are better than would have been garnered were they using traditional product segmentation because concentration would be on one group as a whole. Now, there is a point to note in that in as much as market segmentation is in some ways better than traditional segmentation, it cannot be applied across all types of products and services. To determine the usability of segmentation, marketers must first find out whether a market can be identified and secondly measured. This identification involves finding out which consumers belong to specified market segments (Coughlan, Anderson, Stern, & El-Ansary, 2006).
Additionally, marketers have to find out whether the segments themselves are large enough to bring about a profit. Thirdly, marketers must decide whether or not those predetermined segments can be easily reached through advertising. Lastly, the marketers must be able to determine the response which they will garner from the segments after advertising campaigns have been carried out. All these are specific steps which are involved in marketing segmentation, of which are not found in traditional product segmentation. Due to the fact that market segmentation would like to one, make products suitable to a particular segment and advertising to suit, the aforementioned steps have to be followed. In traditional product segmentation, marketers did not bother with such steps. The only thing that was paid attention to was profits. In traditional product segmentation, the segments did not matter as long as a diverse group of the public was reached. With time however marketers have come to realize the effectiveness of market segmentation in that it avails the chance to reach more segments, and thus turn a higher profit than if traditional product segmentation were being used (Coughlan, Anderson, Stern, & El-Ansary, 2006).
In market segme...