Marketing segmentation is the identification of individuals and organizations with similar characteristics that have important implications for determining marketing strategy. Therefore, market segmentation involves the division of a diversified market into a number of smaller submarkets that have common features.

 

Consumer segmentation can be based on many factors:
Behavioural: benefit sought, purchase occasion, etc. for example: almost everyone use Microsoft Windows but people don't make the same use of it. Therefore, Microsoft came up with many flavors and the customer can pick one according to their need : Home Edition, Professional Edition, Enterprise Edition, etc.
Psychographic: lifestyle, personality, age, etc., for example: Children have become a very important market as they are spending an increasing amount of time on the internet. As we can observe, Disney which is one of the biggest sellers for children, has created a web-based video game called Virtual Magic Kingdom, in an effort to stay relevant in the market.
Profile: demographic, geographic,etc. At a very basic level, markets can be segmented on the basis of country, region or city. Also, it's obvious that the language you use may change according to the country you target.

Once the market segments have been identified, the next important activity is the selection of target markets. Target marketing refers to the choice of specific segments to serve. Suppose you make a social network site, you should first target a specific niche. An example could be to create a site for French speakers, aged 25-35, who like to draw.

Proceed with branding