Week Five Reflection

This past week in HONB 200-02, a large portion of marketing material that was extensively covered in class was in relation to the widely regarded concept of specialization and market segments. Upon the class's completion of our print advertisement assignment based on designated market segments in today's society, each student took turns speaking in front of the class to explain their unique advertisement. They additionally spoke about the specific market segment that they were required to research, including a brief explanation of basic information concerning their segment, such as its typical age range, family size, financial income, etc. The majority of these said aspects that help to describe the market segments fall under the demographic segmentation category. This essentially refers to traits such as, and similar to, age, gender, income, ethnicity, and family life cycle.

 After conveying these details of their segment, each student then discussed how they chose to go about creating their print advertisement for the Bambooee product, given the knowledge that they were attempting to appeal to their specific market segment in order to have a better chance at convincing them to buy the product. Upon listening to each student's presentation on their print advertisement, mine included, one cannot help but note the heavy levels of stereotyping that are necessary for marketers to decide how to best market their product(s). With the implementation of such strong stereotyping, marketers have over time developed categories known as segmentation bases, which divide up markets based off of certain characteristics (that are often stereotyped). These said bases include:

• Geographic segmentation
• Demographic segmentation (as used in the above example)
• Psychographic segmentation
• Benefit segmentation
• Usage-Rate segmentation

With the usage of all of these various segmentation tactics, marketers are able to distinguish their potential consumers based on a multitude of differing traits that can be narrowed down to determine their final target market, which is a group of people or organizations for which an organization designs, implements, and maintains a marketing mix that will satisfy their consumer needs.

The class was then assigned a small group project based off of the newly gained knowledge concerning market segmentation, in which the students have to watch an episode of Shark Tank. In this particular episode, the product being pitched is known as Phone Soap. The purpose of Phone Soap is to clean phones better and more efficiently than any other current cleaning product on today's market. Upon watching this episode, the students were instructed to create a survey in order to determine how great of a need there is for the product in the group's target market. This should be an easier task to complete now that we are fully aware of the many ways in which consumer markets can be segmented and differentiated between.

On Thursday, our marketing class was joined by the honors engineers for another of our joint classes to discuss the progress being made by each of the SMART groups on their Bug projects. My project group, Team BedBug, has been making substantial progress and is planning on meeting again within the next few days to discuss our next move in creating the product.