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Essay / Customer Focused Marketing Strategy - 1055
In business, marketing is one of the activities that helps in generating profits for a single company. Buyers are too numerous, very dispersed and different in their needs. Therefore, a customer-focused marketing strategy is used to view the products or services from the customer's perspective and communicate the message in the customer's language (Schade, 2007). Basically, customer-focused marketing strategy is divided into four main stages: market segmentation, market targeting, positioning and differentiation (see Appendix 1, Figure 1). The first step is market segmentation. According to Cravens and Piercy (2009), market segmentation is the basis for superior performance and it is important to understand the needs and wants of buyers when designing a marketing strategy. It is a process of dividing buyers in a product market into subgroups and should be considered when developing a marketing strategy (Cravens & Piercy, 2009). Furthermore, Cravens and Piercy also stated that segmentation is a recognized process aimed at finding subgroups of buyers within the total market. Dickson and Ginter (1987) assert that "the segmentation opportunity arises when differences in buyers' demand functions allow market demand to be divided into segments, each with a distinct demand function" (p. 1-10 ). Additionally, Kotler and Armstrong (2012) argue that there are four major segmentation variables for customer markets: geographic segmentation, demographic segmentation, psychographic segmentation, and behavioral segmentation. Coincidentally, in the study of Dickson and Ginter (2009) and Kotler and Armstrong (2012), the requirement for effective segmentation must be concrete, substantial and beneficial, identifiable middle of paper...... ng (10th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. Kotler, P. and Armstrong, G. (2012). Principle of Marketing (14th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall. McInne, G. (2014). 5 levels of market differentiation strategies. Retrieved from http://www.slideshare.net/GrahamMcInnes1/5-levels-of-market-differentiation-strategiesPerreault, Jr., WD, Cannon, JP, & McCarthy, EJ (2008). Basic Marketing: An Approach to Marketing Strategy Planning (16th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. Ries, A. and Trout, J. (2001). Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind (20th ed.). Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill Schade, J. (2007). Customer-focused marketing that listens to the person who really takes the orders: your customer. Retrieved from http://www.jrsconsulting.net/freearticles_14.html Ward, S. (2014). Targeted marketing. Retrieved from http://sbinfocanada.about.com/od/marketing/g/targetmarketing.htm