Behavioral Segmentation
In behavioral segmentation, marketers divide buyers into groups on the basis of their knowledge of, attitude toward, use of, or response to a product.
Behavior variables can include needs or benefits, decision roles, and user and usage.
Needs and Benefits
Not everyone who buys a product has the same needs or wants the same benefits from it. Needs-based or benefit-based segmentation identifies distinct market segments with clear marketing implications.
Decision Roles
People can play five roles in a buying decision: Initiator, Influencer, Decider, Buyer, and User.
For example, assume a wife initiates a purchase by requesting a new treadmill for her birthday. The husband may seek information from many sources, including a friend who has a treadmill and is a key influencer in what models to consider. After presenting the alternative choices to his wife, he purchases her preferred model, which ends up being used by the entire family.
Different people are playing different roles, but all are crucial in the decision process and ultimate consumer satisfaction.
User and Usage-Related Variables
Many marketers believe variables related to users or their usage—occasions, user status, usage rate, buyer-readiness stage, and loyalty status—are good starting points for constructing market segments.
Occasions mark a time of day, week, month, year, or other well-defined tem-poral aspects of a consumer’s life. We can distinguish buyers according to the occasions when they develop a need, purchase a product, or use a product. For example, air travel is triggered by occasions related to business, vacation, or family. Occasion segmentation can help expand product usage.
Every product has its nonusers, ex-users, potential users, first-time users, and regular users.
The key to attracting potential users, or even possibly nonusers, is understanding the reasons they are not using. Do they have deeply held attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors or just lack knowledge of the product or benefits?
Included in the potential-user group are consumers who will become users in connection with some life stage or event. Market-share leaders tend to focus on attracting potential users because they have the most to gain from them.
Smaller firms focus on trying to attract current users away from the market leader.
We can segment markets into light, medium, and heavy product users. Heavy users are often a small slice but account for a high percentage of total consumption. Marketers would rather attract one heavy user than several light users. A potential prob-lem is that heavy users are often either extremely loyal to one brand or never loyal to any brand and always looking for the lowest price.
Some people are unaware of the product, some are aware, some are informed, some are interested, some desire the product, and some intend to buy.
Recall from Chapter 4 that marketers can employ a marketing funnel to break the mar-ket into buyer-readiness stages.
Figure 6.2 displays a funnel for two hypothetical brands. Compared with Brand B, Brand A performs poorly at converting one-time users to more recent users (only 46 percent convert for Brand A compared with 61 percent for Brand B).
A marketing campaign could introduce more relevant products, find more accessible retail outlets, or dispel rumors or incorrect brand beliefs
Marketers usually envision four groups based on brand loyalty status:
- hard-core loyals (always buy one brand),
- split loyals (loyal to two or three brands),
- shifting loyals (shift from one brand to another), and
- switchers (not loyal to any brand).
A company can study hard-core loyals to help identify the products’ strengths; study split loyals to see which brands are most competitive with its own; and study shifting loyals and switchers to identify marketing weaknesses that can be corrected.
One caution: What appear to be brand-loyal purchase patterns may reflect habit, indifference, a low price, a high switching cost, or the unavailability of other brands.
Five consumer attitudes about products are
- enthusiastic,
- positive,
- indifferent,
- negative, and
- hostile.
Workers in a political campaign use attitude to determine how much time and effort to spend with each voter. They thank enthusiastic voters and remind them to vote, reinforce those who are positively disposed, try to win the votes of indifferent voters, and spend no time trying to change the attitudes of negative and hostile voters
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