Marketing Strategy and Competitive Positioning pdf ebook

Consumption behaviour
Purchasers of products and services are not necessarily the consumers, or users, of those 
products or services. Examination of usage patterns and volumes consumed (as in the heavy 
user approach) can pinpoint where to focus marketing activity. There are dangers, however, 
in focusing merely on the heavy users. They are, for example, already using the product in 
quantity and therefore may not offer much scope for market expansion. Similarly, they will 
either be current company customers or customers of competitors.
Cook and Mindak (1984) have shown that the heavy user concept is more useful in some 
markets than in others. In the soap market they note that heavy users of soap account for 

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CHAPTER 7 SEGMENTATION AND POSITIONING PRINCIPLES
75 per cent of purchases. However, heavy users account for nearly half the population and 
constitute a very diverse group. By contrast, bourbon whiskey is consumed by around 20 
per cent of adults only, and the heavy users account for 95 per cent of consumption, making 
this a much tighter target market.
In the latter case, brand-loyalty patterns may be set and competition could be fierce. 
Companies may be better advised to research further the light or non-users of the product 
to find out why they do not consume more of the product. In the growth stage of the prod-
uct life cycle the heavy user segment may well be attractive, but when the market reaches 
maturity it may make more sense to try to extend the market by mopping up extra potential 
demand in markets that are not adequately served by existing products.
Product and brand usage has a major advantage over many other situation-specific seg-
mentation variables in that it can be elicited, in the case of many consumer products, from 
secondary sources. The ‘heavy users’ of beer, for example, can be identified through the 
Target Group Index (TGI – see Chapter 4) and their demographic and media habits pro-
filed. For this main reason, consumption is one of the most popular bases for segmenting 
consumer markets in the UK.