Ch. 8 - Segmenting and Targeting Markets

Like most companies, Porsche uses a hybrid of strategies for segmenting and targeting their desired markets. Porsche and other, rather progressive, companies don’t rely on ridged or inflexible rules to adhere by. Porsche may approach these strategies unconventionally but certainly are using a conventional base for segmenting and targeting markets.

Porsche, being a niche/specialty company within a bigger industry, recognizes that having criteria for successfully segmenting and targeting a market is imperative. Their strategy for creating a segmentation scheme has four simple but crucial basic criteria.

Substantiality:  A segment must be large enough to warrant developing and maintaining a special marketing mix. This criterion does not mean that a segment must have many potential customers.  Marketers of Porsche develop marketing programs that can be tailored to each potential customer’s needs.  

Identifiability and measurability: Segments must be identifiable and their size measurable. Data about the population within geographic boundaries, the number of people in various age categories, and other social and demographic characteristics are often easy to get, and they provide fairly concrete measures of segment size. This is where Porsche excels. They are great at measuring how many of the consumers are willing, indifferent or unwilling purchase their cars. With their “data” they are able to tweak sales and promotional campaigns.

Accessibility:  The firm must be able to reach members of targeted segments with customized marketing mixes. This aspect may be hard for most companies, but not for Porsche. Porsche is able to speak a language that is ubiquitous and has molded the company, within the car industry, as a globalized one. This makes Porsche that must easier to be reached and understood.

Responsiveness: Markets can be segmented using any criteria that seem logical. Unless one market segment responds to a marketing mix differently than other segments, however, that segment need not be treated separately. Porsche understands that the responsiveness on a new product they have or one being developed (the Maccan) is a great assessment as to whether, improve that product’s depth, or move on to a newer project.