Retail Marketing Segmentation. MBA Marketing Study Material.

Segmentation is one of a very dynamic and expedient tool for marketing. This post is an effort to clarify what is a segmentation and how the segmentation is beneficial for retail business practices to gain competitive advantage.

What is Market Segmentation?

Market Segmentation is a dissemination of total market into small groups according to some communal features to approach a target market for potential customers. The aim of segmentation is to identify a group with an uppermost probability buy products or services and organization can direct all marketing efforts to that group.

Retailers can be relish by adopting the market segmentation process in their business to attract customers and sustain them for a longer period of time.

Segmentation Process in retail Marketing:

Below figure can make you clear about the overall process of market segmentation.

Parameters of Retail Market Segmentation:

1.      Geographic Segmentation:

Dividing a market into a subgroup according to geographic place is called as a geographic segmentation. This segmentation can be done with the location of city, country or region, a climate of location, size of the population or through the density of area market can be divided into urban, suburban, rural etc.

2.      Demographic Segmentation:

Demographic segmentation consists the process of dividing a market into sub-segments according to age, gender, religion, language, income, marital status, education, occupation, employment or culture etc.

3.      Psychographic Segmentation:

In this type of segmentation, a market can be divided into a subgroup according to the psychology of customers. Subgrouping can be done in this segment through analyzing interest, hobbies, lifestyle, values, and ethics, learning involvement, perception, and attitude of people.

4.      Behavioral Segmentation:

In behavioral segmentation, retailers need to analyze the curiosity and behavior of people while purchasing a product or services by segmenting a market into a subcategory. A market can be categorized by frequency of purchase, user status or user rate etc. It can be divided into a subgroup of loyalty status or awareness about product or service etc.

Above are the common parameters of segmentation which can help to focus on marketing efforts.

Types of Retailers. MBA Marketing Study Material

Retailer or the retail store is a business enterprise where the product or service is placed to sell it to the end users for their personal use. There is a range of different ownership structures of retailing. Let’s have a look one by one:

1.      Department Store:

Department store is a big organization with complex offerings of a wide range of products. It can be one company who is managing collective small retail stores. In this type of store, retailers are offering a various range of pricing. It offers a deep assortment of product where customers can get almost all the products under one roof.

2.      Speciality Store:

As name stats itself, these stores are focused on only one product line with a deep assortment. Specialty retailers are selling a specific category of products. In this type of store, retailers are offering customer expert knowledge and high level of services with value-added services like selling related products in the same outlet.  

3.      Supermarket:

Usually, Supermarkets are the self-service store that offers a range of food and beverage products as well as household items. In the supermarket, products are properly assorted and placed in a specific manner for customer’s convenience. It is an advanced form of a grocery store. The aim of supermarkets is to offer the variety of items with low margin and with high volume sales.

4.      Discount Store:

Discount Stores are self-service outlets with a range of products which offers low price or a huge discount on buying. Generally, discount retailer’s resale the end of the line and returned goods at discounted prices. Discount retailers are engaged in both hard and soft goods but with limited options and variety.

5.      Warehouse Store:

Warehouse stores are large or medium stores in which goods are stocked and packaged in large quantity and sell it at lower than competitive prices.

6.      Convenience Store:

These are the self-service stores usually located near to the residential area for customer’s convenience offering a narrow variety of products which fulfill daily essentials of people such as grocery, food, medicines etc. Convenience stores are open for long hours of time.

7.      E-Tailer:

E-commerce businesses specially engaged in retailing are called as E-tailer. E-tailers are the retailers who sell their products on online shopping websites through the internet. These type of retailers are providing a home delivery of product to the customer.

8.      Chain Store or Franchises:

Franchise or chain store is a retail business model where a retailer buys an ownership of a big brand with its rights to sell its product in the local area.  Chain store brings together local ownership. The aim of this type of store to expand the business of one particular brand and to aware the people about the organization that they can conveniently purchase the product in the local market.

9.      Malls and Shopping Store:

This is a modern concept of retailing where all the retail brands get together to sell their products under one roof of large center. This concept is getting very popular because of its deep assortment and variety of products at one place. Malls may include supermarkets and hypermarkets and specialty stores as well.

The above types of retailers or retail stores can be customized according to the circumstances to meet the demand of customers.  

Product Retailing Vs. Service Retailing. MBA Marketing Study Material.

Service section in every economy is as important as a product since it’s been proved that public spent 50% of its earning for all personal use of service. This post describes the differences between product retailing and service retailing.

Product Retailing	Service Retailing
Products are tangible in nature, consequently, overriding factors in product retailing which define the success of product are cost and quality of a product.	Services are intangible in nature, hence factors that overriding in service retailing which describe the success of service are timeliness, behavior and knowledge of service delivery professionals.
As products are physically available the relationship between retailers and customers can be developed by the frequency of consumer’s visit to the outlet or website in case of online business.	In case of service retailing, services are not physically available and cannot be touched and so the relationship between retailers and customers can be developed by only start buying it at least once.
In product retailing, it can be sorted, arranged and organized well.	In service retailing, services are intangible in nature and so cannot be sorted.
Standardization is an important factor which can be maintained in product retailing through a consistency in the production method.	In case of service retailing, standardization cannot be maintained due to the involvement of human being as service delivery professionals.
Transfer of ownership is possible in case of product retailing. Once the product gets purchased by consumers the ownership of the product is transferred automatically from the retailer to the consumer.	Transfer of ownership is not possible in case of service retailing. Consumers are the end users of service hence the ownership will remain with service provider only.
Products are not perishable and can be stored for future use. In product retailing, production is the first process where a product can be invented before storing it.	Services are perishable and cannot be stored for further use. Production and consumption is a simultaneous process in service retailing. Therefore it’s difficult in this case to balance supply and demand in same time.
In a product retailing, customers or the end users are not necessarily present at the time of a transaction.	Here at service section, customers or end users must be physically present at the time of service delivery transaction.

What is Retail Marketing? MBA Marketing study Material.

The concept of retail shops transformed over the period of time from small booths and roadside sellers to the big modish shopping malls of the modern age. This post gives you a complete detail about what is retail marketing? Before going to the retail marketing, first, let’s have a look at the meaning “Retail”.

What is Retail?

Retailing embraces business activities of selling a product or service to the consumers for their personal, family and household use.  Purpose of retail is the sale of the product to final consumers. Retailers are always performed as an intermediate between manufacturer and consumers. Retailers accumulate the variety of products from different sources and sell it in small quantity to the consumers. In many industries, manufacturers have modified their products with the help of retailer’s reviews and feedbacks. Further, Retail environments factors can be alienated into:

• The macro environment includes following state and local laws that confirm business activities are fair and do not take advantage of the consumers through unrealistic pricing, wrong advertising, and disingenuous promotions.
• The micro environment involves considering customers and competitors as a whole.

What is Retail Marketing?

Retail marketing comprises the range of marketing activities undertaking by retailers to influence the consumers or the end users to buy the product or service for their personal use. Retail marketing aims to increase the awareness and interest of product or service which can influence the people to buy it for their use. It simply the promotion of products or services in the market to in an effort of generating sale from end users. There are many different strategies to approach the consumers like advertising, PR etc.

Retail Marketing Mix: 4 P’s of Retail Marketing.

Approaching a right marketing mix can lead to the profitable growth and higher returns on investment. Below, you will find 4 P’s of retail marketing:

1.      Product:

In retail marketing, product decision includes deciding what goods or services should be offered for sale to a particular set of consumers. Selection of product category is very important in product mix. The categories involve durable goods such as appliances, furniture, electronic goods and sports equipment and food, soft goods or consumables such as clothing, furnishings, cosmetics, paper goods and other items with a typical lifespan of a year or less. Product mix involves each decision which varies from product choice.

2.      Price:

Price mix in retail marketing involves a set of decisions taking by retailers for their product aims to reach up to the profit margin. Pricing decisions can be taken by considering policies such as everyday low pricing, high-low pricing, competitive pricing, psychological pricing etc. In retail marketing, a price can be decided by considering the cost of the product plus transportation, apart from these costs all other costs are negligible.

3.      Place:

The place is a key element of retail marketing mix. Where to sell a product or service? An answer to this question decides the location of the business. In retailer’s point of view, location or place is very important element because these decisions concerning the distribution channels to be used and their management, the locations of outlets, methods of transportation and inventory levels to be held. The aim is to certify that products and services are available in the proper quantities, at the right time and place.

4.      Promotion:

Increase the sales volume of a product through influencing customers to buy it is the main objective of promotion mix in retail marketing. To promote the product, retailers have to obtain various strategies such as print advertisements, television advertisement, internet marketing, outdoor billboards, radio, Magazine advertisements, PR campaigns etc.  Promotion mix can be influenced by factors such as the competitive retail environment, the profit margin on sales and the budget available for promotion purposes.

These are the fundamental retail marketing mix in every retailing business.

Recent trends in Marketing Research. MBA Marketing study material.

This is an era of technology, instant communication, huge data. In this era, more businesses are realizing the need to pull the knowledge of market researchers in bringing the voice of the customer to the organization. This post is focused on the recent trends in Marketing Research to explore more business opportunities with emerging drifts in a competitive marketplace. Let’s have a look:

·         Artificial Intelligence(AI):

Thanks to the google home and amazon echo, Artificial Intelligence has entered in consumer landscape. It also is known as Machine Intelligence which is basically a machine learning problem-solving techniques in contrast to Natural Intelligence (NI). Apart from machine learnings, AL will come up with a transformation in many aspects of research including survey and questionnaire development, field management, big data analytics and advanced computing power. Al transformation will not be able to replace the traditional research methodology of a survey and qualitative research, in fact, it is an elementary part of AL.

·         Automation:

Recent survey stats that the trend of future of research will be automation. Researchers are going to be faster, cheaper and standard. Automation abilities are constantly growing and this leads to a big change in the industries. Sometimes, the researcher’s need is to get research done only with the help of automated processes. Along with Artificial Intelligence, Automation can transform the future of research. Automation helps to provide an opportunity to take more evidence-based decision making in marketing research.

Sometimes, automation may give a bad result as it picks a speed of doing it, but it will never make you compromise with enhancement of quality as it provides relevant answers with minimum cost.

·         Turning insight into an action:

In the current scenario, data is getting cheaper and vast in quantity. But the techniques to find what research need in data is called a process of finding insights. Data handling is a fancy name for insight finding. There is so many organization are involved and newly emerging in data handling process such as official reports and e-tabs etc.

Finding insights is not only the work to deal with research but these insights have to be converted into an action to reach the goal.  Many of consultants such as Brainjuicer and Insite consultancy are engaged and becoming widespread in turning insights into an action.

·         Big Data and Data Integration:

It is possible nowadays to store a massive amount of data and information at the cheapest cost. Data collection devices have evolved the pace of data creation. In a survey, IBM estimates 90% of the data in the world has been created in the last 2 years. It is possible to be logged in and recorded every transaction or event for study.

No doubt, big data trend is useful for future without replacing a traditional market research process but larger data represents enormous challenges for marketing research. Here, the data Integration plays a very important role. Integration between two or more type of data from different resources into one useful insight is a recent trend of marketing research.

        

·         Going Digital:

Undeniably, Smartphones are the best example of a recent trend in marketing research. Smartphones work as not so far from computers or laptops in all around the world. In this phase, mobile marketing is a new drift of current scenario of the global market. Researcher uses the smartphone as a data collection tool which is handy, easy, user-friendly and fastest.

As the globe has connected to the internet, everything is not so far from us. Internet covered a range of topics and information for research. We can see in future evolution in mobile-only research, in particular, app and message-based solutions for using smartphones for market research will grab the world rapidly.

Applications of Marketing Research. MBA Marketing study material.

Marketing Research plays a significant role where the organization and people associates to each other through the process of data collection and data analysis to identify the scope of the market for product or services. Applications of marketing research is an instinctual interface which provides statistical or graphical practices for market research analysis. It does not only help to identify the target market but focuses on evaluating choices and preferences of potential consumers.

Application of Marketing Research Process:

·         Product Research:

Product research usually conducts to calculating possible acceptance of a new product, upgrade or additions to existing products, making wise decisions on product packaging and determining product acceptability over market competition. Product research mainly focuses on how customers might react to a product.

·         Pricing Research:

Pricing research is dealing with the decisions on pricing strategies of a product according to the cost of production and profit margin for the organization. It helps to determine the acceptability of price of product or services where consumers feel that it is worth to pay for it. It makes you understand the variety of price level as per the competitive market to achieve desired profit.

·         Concept Testing:

Concept testing comprises of assessing new product concept, brand names, advertising concept etc. It basically focuses on the process of generating a new product and its concept behind developing it with pricing concept, ad appeals, and positioning.

·         Positioning Research:

Positioning Research covers all the study of how the existing product or services has been positioned in the competitive marketplace and how to launch and presenting a new product in the potential market. This research helps to define the consumer’s responses or reviews about the product or services so that organization can find out the scope for its positioning.  

·         Advertising Research:

It consists a set of decisions on advertising a product or services, ads developments or advertising campaigns to find out the scope where the organization can apply advertising practices to influence the customers. An organization often conducts a campaign in advertising research to find out whether it is really beneficial to invest in advertising platform for its product and if it's beneficial then this research helps to find out from how many ways the organization can invest to achieve its advertising goals.

·         Market Segmentation:

A market segment is a research process of dividing a market into sub-categories according to the special characteristics. It is normally divided potential consumers into segments by looking at features such as shared needs, common interests or similar lifestyles. This research helps to recognize the high yield segment or profitable segment of the market.

·         Branding Research:

In this type of research, an organization makes an opinion about the product value by reviewing the consumer’s statements on the product. Branding is what are the opinions of people about the product and, what people think about the organization. It assists with the creation, development, and ongoing management and strengthening of brands. Branding research conducts to understand the landscape and develop a launch strategy in the competitive market.

·         Sales Analysis:

Sales Analysis is a research to conduct and analyze the customer records and other available data to identify the sales opportunities in the market. Sales research also analyze whether the sales presentation is effectively moving over the competition in market or not. It helps to record and calculate percentage of sales, stock inventory sales force and other sales related activities.

Applications of marketing research demand the forecasting of the studies in every area such as product, sales, price, advertising etc. which has explained in above process.

What is Data Interpretation and Report Writing in Marketing Research? MBA Marketing Study Material.

Data Analysis is a very crucial step to fulfill the purpose of research but researcher needs to represent this outcome of analysis in a meaningful way by summarizing it in short sentences, this is the step of Data interpretation and report writing in marketing research. Data Interpretation and report writing is simply the overall conclusion of marketing research. The purpose of research is not well served unless the findings are made known to others.

Data Interpretation:

Data Interpretation is a process of illustrating of inferences from the analysis study in a very meaningful way.  Interpretation is concerned with relationships within the collected data, partially corresponding analysis. Interpretation also covers beyond the data analysis to comprise the results of other research, theory, and hypotheses.

Techniques of Data Interpretation:

Data Interpretation often involves following techniques:

·         Explanation:

The researcher needs to give reasonable explanations of the relations which has found and needs to interpret the lines of relationship in terms of the underlying processes and try to find out the thread of consistency that falls under the surface layer of expanded research findings.

·         Extraneous Information:

During the study, if the researcher has extraneous information which seems unnecessary at that time then it must be considered while interpreting the final results of marketing research.

·         Guidance:

Before boarding upon final interpretation, it is advisable to consult someone having perception into the study who will not vacillate to point out the errors in logical argumentation. This guidance will result in correct interpretation which will enhance the value of research.

·         Relevant Factors:

The researcher needs to finish the task of interpretation only after considering all relevant factors affecting the study to avoid false generalization.

Report Writing:

A report is a page or a document which consist of summery and interpretation of research done based on factual data, opinions of individuals or group. As a matter of fact, even the most intense hypothesis, well-designed research study, and the most outstanding generalizations and findings will have little value unless they are successfully communicated to others. Report writing is the last step in a research study and requires skills beyond earlier steps.

Steps involved in report writing:

·         Logical analysis of the subject-matter:

There are two ways to analyze subject matter logically that are Logical treatment and Chronological treatment. Logical treatment frequently contains in developing the material from the simple possible to the most complex arrangements. Chronological treatment is based on a connection or sequence in time or occurrence. 

·         Preparation of the final outline:

Outlines are the structure upon which long written works are erected. It is an aid to the logical organization of the material and a reminder of the points to be stressed in the report.

·         Preparation of the rough draft:

This step involves the process of analysis of the subject and the preparation of the final outline. The researcher will write down in this rough draft about the procedure adopted of data collection along with its limitations, data analysis techniques adopted in this research etc.

·         Rewriting and polishing:

Usually, this step takes more time than previous steps of report writing. This step involves the careful revision of outline draft revising it very carefully to make it a good piece of writing. The researcher needs to polish the draft by checking the grammar, spellings etc.

·         Preparation of the final bibliography:

A bibliography is the list of books, magazines, and references etc. which are used to study in this research. The bibliography should be organized alphabetically and may be divided into two parts. The first part may cover the names of books and the second part may cover the names of magazine and newspaper articles. 

·         Writing the final draft:

This is the step where the final draft should be written in a brief and objective style and in simple language, avoiding unclear expressions such as “it seems”, “there may be”. A research report should not be dull, should maintain interest and show originality. The report should be an attempt to solve some intellectual problem and must contribute to the solution of a problem and must add to the knowledge of both the researcher and the reader.

Steps involved in this post may vary from research to research, depends on its usage in a study.