Marketing Strategy and Competitive Positioning pdf ebook

CHAPTER 8 SEGMENTATION AND POSITIONING RESEARCH 
to be a poor method of targeting. With only 31 prime target customers being in the most-
favoured enumeration district, 119 out of 150 households would have been mistargeted. To 
be fair, as with other means of off-the-peg segmentation discussed, geodemographics are 
powerful when related to products linked directly to characteristics of the neighbourhood 
districts; for instance, the demand for double glazing, gardening equipment, etc. Even in the 
case provided, targeting the best enumeration districts increases the probability of hitting 
a target customer from less than 10 per cent to over 20 per cent, but misses are still more 
common than hits. 
Lifestyle segmentation provides an opportunity to overlay geodemographic data with 
lifestyle characteristics. This has sometimes been used in conjunction with demographics 
and forms the second part of two-stage segmentation. Third Age Research has done this, 
after first identifying the over-65s as a target market and then breaking them up into lifestyle 
segments of apathetic, comfortable, explorer, fearful, organiser, poor me, social lion and 
status quo. To anyone who has contact with more than one older person, it is clear that 
these labels provide a far more powerful way of putting a face on the over-65 customer 
than does their age alone. 
Stanford Research Institute in the United States developed a lifestyle segmentation 
scheme called Values and Lifestyles (VALS) that has seven categories: belongers (patri-
otic, stable traditionalists content with their lives); achievers (prosperous, self-assured, 
middle-aged materialists); emulators (ambitious young adults trying to break into the 
system); I-am-me group (impulsive, experimental and a bit narcissistic); societally 
conscious (mature, successful, mission-orientated people who like causes); survivors
(the old and poor with little optimism for the future); and sustainers (resentful of 
their condition and trying to make ends meet). A similar scheme has been developed 
for use in pan-European marketing, including: successful idealists ; affluent material-