Principles of Marketing

Gender and Marketing

Many products, from fragrances to fashion apparel and accessories, specifically appeal to men or women. Traditional segmentation by gender often starts at an early age—even diapers come in pink for girls and blue for boys.

While society's perspective on gender has changed in recent years and there's been a shift toward less rigid and binary definitions of gender, most marketing continues to categorize products for men or for women. In some cases, manufacturers develop parallel products to appeal to each sex.

A growing number of people are taking a more fluid attitude toward gender—that is, beyond the traditional male/female dichotomy. Gender identity is the personal sense of one's own gender.

Gender identity can correlate with a person's assigned sex at birth or can differ from it.

Gender expression typically reflects a person's gender identity, but this is not always the case.

Androgyny refers to individuals who exhibit both masculine and feminine characteristics.

Androgyny refers to the possession of both masculine and feminine traits.

Nowadays, marketers are more frequently making a distinction between sex-typed people—who are stereotypically masculine or feminine—and androgynous people.

Androgyny can create new target markets for savvy marketers who create products for that growing segment.

One way to do this is for a firm to take a current product sold to one gender and test the waters with it or an adaptation of it for the opposite gender. When this approach is successful, the result is gender-bending products, which are traditionally sex-typed items adapted to the opposite gender. The fashion apparel industry is often an initial conduit for such expansion, often sparked by a superstar’s wardrobe statement.

BY FAMILY LIFE CYCLE

BY INCOME AND SOCIAL CLASS

PRINCIPLES OF MARKETING 2022-2023

BY RACE AND ETHNICITY

GEOGRAPHIC SEGMENTATION

Segment

By psychographics

PRINCIPLES OF MARKETING 2022-2023

By behavior

Long tail in the music industry

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By Usage occasions

By diet

Such groups of segmentation have to share the same needs

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STEP 2: TARGETING

Whether or not to totally ignore the previous process of segmentation. The result can be that we are better off selecting people into segmentation and treating any customer as a single individual. The segment we chose to serve are our target.

Part 1: Evaluate market segments

5 forces framework:

Second vertical force: Your customers that must buy from you because you don't have competitors

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Competitors: The higher the number of companies operating in a single market, the less attractive that segment will be because customers will have more alternatives.

Third force, horizontal one: My customers maybe don't need exactly my product, but they can buy something else. The higher the number of alternatives that are not the same products of that same product.

determinate the threat that that product can be substituted

value net: one central product and several complementing products

➔ cellphone: that can be changed as a product, but agencies can provide

◆ different apps

complementors increase the value of the product

◆ growth rate: maybe the segment is attractive now but it can be tricky

➔ if i have a fast growing market, i have to keep an eye with how the market in

◆ general is going (if my competitors are rowing in a decibel rate then me than

there is a problem with me)

synergies: a saving of economies of scope

➔ you are spending less than what you are producing

◆ ● serving one more segment could be an interesting alternative to

explore

ripple effects and interactions among segments: one segment could improve my

➔ position in another segment i want to join in

halo effect

◆ i am operating in an extremely small segment, maybe there is another

◆ segment in which i can operate in in which i can lower my prices without

affecting my main

PART 2: develop segment profiles

PART 3: Choose a target strategy

economy of scale: we can bug down the production just by decreasing the scale of the production

concentrated targeting strategy: targeting is about choosing which servers to serve

Choose a targeting strategy

Mass marketing

differentiated product: ferrari, perfume chanel n. 1

some people would prefer this product over the other

• this product does not need to be expensive
• it is a product that delivers more value to its customers
• a product you buy regardless of the price because it delivers more value
• the product must have value

undifferentiated product: something that can be replaced, that promises the same value as many other products

if you have to choose between two alternatives that have the same value, you go for the cheapest one

it is a product a customer chooses because it is the cheapest one and it is similar to another product

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Differentiated strategy: each segment benefits from a precise offering

• must consider interaction cannibalization between segments
• goldilocks strategy and versioning (self selection)
• goldilocks strategy:
  • la storia dei tre orsi e della bambina
  • Usually, customers go for the middle one. these companies give you more alternatives
  • use the strategies whenever offering alternatives is not expensive

Concentrated strategy: we try to offer the best solution possible to the specific segment

• you're not big enough to serve the whole marketing
• the company focuses on obtaining a specific positioning in a single segment
• limited resources
  • more effective communications
  • closer relations with customer
  • highly profitable customers, and so on
  • vulnerability/growth trap

Ethics and Targeting: some start to worry about targeting specific products (from clothes to cosmetics, down to some toys such as barbie) to young girls

◆ ● in other cases, addressing a specific audience in terms of gender, age, minorities and so on could grant positive outcomes.

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STEP 03: Positioning

is the process by which marketers develop a marketing strategy to influence how a particular market segment perceives a good or service in comparison to the competition. It is not a company choice.

◆ companies don't control any element of it

◆ video di berlusconi

The final stage of developing a target marketing strategy is to provide consumers who belong to a targeted market segment with a good or service that meets their unique needs and expectations.

Positioning means developing a marketing strategy to influence how a particular market segment perceives a good or service in comparison to the competition. A key word in this definition is perceives—that is, positioning is in the eye of the beholder.

To position a brand, marketers must clearly understand the criteria target consumers use to evaluate competing products and then convince them that their product, service, or organization will meet those needs. In addition, the organization has to come up with a plan to communicate this position to its target market.

STEPS IN POSITIONING:

1. Analyze competitors' positions
2. Define your competitive advantage
3. Finalize marketing mix
4. Evaluate response and modify if needed

Step 01: Analyze competitors' positions

Understand the positioning of both direct and indirect competitors. Are your product's benefits superior to those of competitor products? The first stage is to analyze competitors' positions in the marketplace. To develop an effective positioning strategy, marketers must understand the current lay of the land. What competitors are out there, and how does the target market perceive them? And it's important to realize that competitors come in.

two flavors:

• direct competitors, whose offerings are very similar to yours, and
• indirect competitors, whose offerings are different from yours but potentially could provide the same benefits and satisfy the same customer needs as your offerings do.

Positioning strategy

the company has no complete control over its positioning

• positioning is relative
• it depends on customer
• it depends on competitor

Sometimes the indirect competition can be more important than the direct, especially if it represents an emerging consumer trend. For years, McDonald's developed positioning strategies based only on its direct competition, which it defined as other large fast-food hamburger chains

Step 2: Define Your Competitive Advantage

The second stage is to offer a good or service with a competitive advantage to provide a reason why consumers will perceive the product as better than that of the competition.

Toward this end, a positioning statement