Marketing is the art of knowing how to sell a product and getting it directly to the hands of the consumers. Of course in order to do this, one has to know which group of customers he should actually zoom in on. The art of determining which group of people a marketer should push his product to is the art of making a market segmentation strategy.

Everyone is probably familiar with the concept of the hierarchy of needs made by Maslow which states that a person has five levels of needs that have to be satisfied. These are the things needed to live, then the things needed to stay safe, then the things needed to feel a sense of belonging, and the things needed to make one feel good. All products will have to be under one of these needs otherwise the product will not do well in the market.

From the hierarchy, one will be able to know what type of product he is to sell. He will either be marketing a convenience product, an unsought product, a shopping product, or a specialty product. If one would connect these to the hierarchy, he can see that the convenience products satisfy the basic needs, the unsought ones satisfy the safety needs, the shopping ones for the belonging, and the specialty ones handle the self esteem and self actualization.

In order to know which target segment should be concentrated on, one must first be able to make an analysis on the demographics of the ideal consumer. Demographics meaning the age group that would be target, the gender, and of course the class the consumer is in whether he is in the A, B, C or D classes. When he has determined that, he can go even much further.

When one has already determined the demographics of the target segment, then it is time to go a little bit more micro when it comes to the consumer. Now the psychographics would involve the lifestyle of the consumer and how the mind of the consumer would work. Basically, psychographics would cover the activities, interests, behavioral patterns, and opinion of the consumer.

Brand loyalty is also a very important aspect of marketing that can be solved by the use of good segmentation. Now through the psychographics, one can now take a closer look at how each consumer behaves. The marketer will be concentrating on how the consumer behaves with regard to the product like how many times the consumer uses it, if he buys it all over again, and how he reacts to the price.

With the help of the price, product, place, and promotion strategies, one may now be able to come up with a strategy in targeting the specific group of people to sell the product to. Basically, one has now already determined the target segment at this point. From there, a great plan for zooming in on them can be made.

Now if one is tasked to make a market segmentation strategy, he must first go through this basic process. He must first determine what the product is and what type of people should be targeted. Once that is done, many plans and tactics may be made.