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MARKET IDENTIFICATION

9 November, 2015 - 11:43

Identifying, or targeting, markets is a task that requires considerable managerial effort. Most MNCs have within the marketing department a marketing research office, whose prime function is to identify markets. Market researchers use the "seven Os" framework to identify primary customers and their responses to products, prices, promotions, and places to buy.

(1) Occupants are the targets of the marketing effort. The marketer must define the customers to be approached along numerous dimensions, such as demographics (age, sex, and nationality, for example), geography ( country or region), psychographics (attitudes, interests, and opinions ), product-related variables (usage rate and brand loyalty, for example), and customer types (industrial or final, for example).

(2) Objects are what is being bought at present to satisfy particular needs. Included in this category are physical objects, services, ideas, organizations, places, and persons.

(3) Occasions are the times when members of the target market buy the product or service. This information is important to the marketer because a product's consumption may be tied to a particular time periodfor example, imported beer may be consumed in quantity only at a oncea-year festival.

(4) Objectives are the factors motivating customers to purchase or adopt the product. A computer manufacturer markets not hardware but solutions to problems, because it is the desire to solve a problem that motivates a customer to buy a computer. Many customers are motivated in part by the "hidden value" in the product they purchase, which may be a function of, for example, the national origin of the product or its brand name.

(5) Outlets are the places where customers expect to be able to procure a product or to be exposed to messages about it.

(6) Organization refers to how the buying or acceptance of a new idea or

product takes place.

(7) Opposition refers to the company's competition, as well as to groups antagonistic to the firm's product or goal. In the case of the tobacco industry, for example, the opposition would include nonsmokers who are opposed to cigarettes and other tobacco products.

An alternative way of obtaining the data needed to design a marketing management strategy is to collect information about the "five Ws" and "three Hs."