You are here

Segmenting by Demographics

15 January, 2016 - 09:18

Segmenting buyers by tangible, personal characteristics such as their ages, incomes, ethnicity, family sizes, and so forth is called demographic segmentation. This section will discuss some prominent demographic characteristics used to segment buyers, including age, income, gender, and family life cycles. Other demographic characteristics include occupation, education, nationality, religion, and social class.

Demographics are commonly utilized to segment markets because a mountain of demographic information is publicly available in databases around the world. You can obtain a great deal of demographic information on the U.S. Census Bureau’s Web site (http://www.census.gov). Other government Web sites you can tap include FedStats (http://www.fedstats.gov) and The World Factbook (http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook), which contains statistics about countries around the world. In addition to current statistics, the sites contain forecasts of demographic trends, such as whether some segments of the population are expected to grow or decline.