Chapter 7 - Demographics

Perhaps one of the most important aspects of marketing is covered in Chapter 7. Of the course of this chapter, Professor Featherman discusses the concept of target marketing, which he defines as "the market segments on which an organization focuses its marketing plan and toward which it directs its marketing efforts". By specifically "targeting" a certain type of individual, companies can create products/services that appeal to their target market and can generally assume the same purchasing habits amongst the entire target market. In order to gain enough information about a desired target market, market researchers often turn to demographics in order to propell themselves into deeper, more extensive, target market research. Featherman defines demographics as "statistics that measure observably aspects of a population, including size, age, gender, ethnic group, income, education, occupation, and family structure". When a market researcher acquires the demographics of a certain area, they can predict how their product/service will do considering the amount of individuals in the area that can be classified as a target market. Demographics can reveal a small target market in a previous assumed profitable area and discover a large target market in a region they least expected. An extremely general example of demographics can be seen in the picture above, classifying Facebook use per country during January 2008. If, for example, a company wanted to promote a product in February via an online networking website, this graph indicates that the target market would most likely be located in the U.S., U.K., and Canada, the top three countries with the most Facebook use in January 2008.