Week 7 reading reflection

 This week's reading was on Daniel Yankelovich and David Meer's "Rediscovering Market Segmentation."

1. So the marketing segmentation technique, if successful, helps companies tailor their products. But the technique is now mostly used by advertising agencies. That to me, was kind of a surprise. Because if you think about it, advertising is a business.
2. What confused me was the graph, which looked at two sets of characteristics versus a segmentation to develop advertising and a segmentation to develop new products.  While the graph clearly laid out what it was looking at in terms of data, I don’t understand how all of these variables play into the technique. Why is the customer’s attitude surveyed for advertising, but it’s the purchase and usage data on customers when it comes to developing new products. As I’m typing it out, it makes more sense, but I’m not sure what the graph’s use is.
3. If I could ask the author a question, I would ask: “What types of patterns of looking at what consumers buy have proven to be successful?” The author gives a good example about how a company, in this case Miller Lite, used an ad technique that wasn’t successful. Their commercial of mud-wrestling supermodels didn’t increase sales. So what could Miller Lite have done better, other than sexualize women?
4. There wasn’t really anything I disagreed with the author about. It’s just a concept I have to study a bit more to understand.