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Market Segmentation and Target Markets

While market segmentation is not a particularly difficult topic to teach, I've often felt that I've taught it in a superficial way - usually by showing students pictures of certain products and asking them who they think is most likely to buy them. This would often lead to a debate about why companies produce different versions of the same product (e.g. washing powders). The best reaction often comes when students are quizzed as to why they don't buy cheap trainers!

I've always felt though that this approach did little to develop the analytical and evaluative skills required at AS/A2 level. But to do this, students would require data to analyse, and that was always a problem! The only way to obtain such data seemed to involve spending hours researching it myself, or to use the limited number of past papers which contain market research data and ask students to choose an appropriate market segment.

However, I recently came across a website from the Joint Industry Committee for Regional Press Research (JICREG), which gives a really useful summary of demographic profiles across different UK regions. An example is shown below for the Midlands:

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Data are provided about the size of the population, the gender and age breakdown of the population as well as the socio-economic profile. What's more, the site gives breakdowns of the demographic profile of local and regional newspaper readers, as shown below:

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Not only is this information really interesting - it's real! Best of all, it is available free of charge and can be downloaded in Excel format and edited to suit your needs. This means it can be used in a number of ways. Here are three ideas to start with:

1. Ask students to develop a new product that they think will appeal to the demographic profile of a particular region.
2. Give students a real product, aimed at a particular market segment and ask them to research the best newspapers to place adverts in so as to reach the target market.
3. Get the students to bring in local newspapers, and obtain the relevant demographic profile of readers of their papers. Then ask them to analyse how the newspapers are different and identify what makes them appeal to different market segments?

The website in question is http://jiab.jicreg.co.uk/index.cfm. You will need to log-in as a guest before you can start to search their database. Once logged in, you can search as much as you need. When I used this website with a group of sixth-formers, it stimulated really good discussions, which clearly enabled them to both analyse and evaluate the information that they had obtained.

Resources created by Adrian Murray, October 2008.