Consumer behavior segmentation methods Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Consumer behavior segmentation methods - Essay Example Geographic segmentation focuses on the characteristics of a population, the geographic region, and similar such characteristics tied to specific geographies. Segmentation is a natural offshoot of the insight that markets are complex, and that to be successful brand managers need to segment markets with specific needs, and responding to specific segmentation cues and messages of benefits. The four basic segmentation methods offer alternative ways of viewing and understanding such complex markets (TIS Consulting Group, 2012; Tynan and Drayton, 1987). Apple’s iPhone stands out from the competition in the way it is perceived by its customers as being premium, of offering a cool factor, of being the standard against which all other smart phones in the world are compared and measured to, and in offering an ecosystem of apps, music and other media content that both the providers of the content and apps as well as the purchasers of those content get unparalleled value in comparison to competing ecosystems and platforms, such as Android represented chiefly by Samsung smart phones. The ecosystem is not a trivial aspect of the phone, but lies at the heart of its appeal from a functional point of view. The phone serves as a gateway to the world of Apple services, and where customers become familiar to that world of services, they become entrenched and are unable to switch to other ecosystems without considerable adjustment. The ecosystem is an anchor for retaining customers as Apply churns out new models and iterations of its phone s. The ecosystem too adds to the appeal of the phone, in terms of the way the different services in themselves, and the different apps, work in ways that are optimal in iPhones, and not in other devices. For instance, Apple’s music and content services work only with the iPhone, while many apps, while also