Kellogg on Marketing, 3rd Edition

CHAPTER 8Target Market Analysis: How to Identify the Right Customers

Julie Hennessy

This chapter introduces a very central and important concept of marketing: the importance of targets. We'll get into the details of the “how‐tos” of target selection in a little bit. But first you'll need a little background to understand why making decisions about who your target is, and even who your target is not, is so important. Before we get to work on picking targets, let's consider how the situation you will face as a marketer today is fundamentally different from the one you would have faced as a marketer in the 1960s or 1970s, the era that saw the birth of many of today's consumer mega brands. This is important because the rules for success seem to be changing before our very eyes.

Today's Marketer Is Not an Adman

Let's start with a question, one I've asked my students many times: “When you think of the word marketing, what comes into your mind?” Now, I don't know for sure what you thought, but I can guess. I bet more than a few of you thought “advertising” or “selling,” and this isn't surprising. That's because to a lot of the world, marketing means advertising.

To those people who are not in the field, the work of marketing is the work of the advertising agency. They picture a client bringing their product in and advertising people devising clever, maybe even manipulative, ways to get the consumer to know and want and buy something that they might not otherwise know or want or ...