Ch. 8 - Segmenting and Targeting Markets

Pantene Pro V understands the importance of their target markets needs and wants. This does not come easy of course, it takes a strong team to perform research and development. As they are a worldwide premium company, in order to maintain a balanced marketing mix along with effective sales, Pantene uses a strategy known as market segmentation. This strategy is the process of dividing a market into meaningful, relatively similar, and identifiable segments or groups. From a marketing perspective this plays a key role as this does enables marketers to perform more efficiently as better evaluation takes place when objectives are more precise. Markets can be segmented using a single variable, such as age group, gender, education and ethnic background.

Pantene segments their markets in several ways but the main one is demographic segments, the common basis here are age, gender, income and ethnic background. When it comes to the age division, Pantene without a question targets the generation y group. Generation Y'ers were born between 1982 and 2003. This group not only has formidable purchasing power but they are also more civic-minded than other age groups. Gender segment is another important subgroup in Pantene Pro V as their primary target market are women, however their products are still available for men. Studies show that women make over 70% of household purchases of consumer goods each year. They are an experienced purchasing group with the responsibility of purchasing most of the household goods. Ethnicity is a popular demographic variable for segmenting markets because Pantene products don’t change to appeal to a subgroup instead their advertising does, this is done to appeal to local preferences. For example, when Pantene publishes their magazine advertisements in different regions of the world, whatever geographic area it is, the Pantene model has the same ethnic background in the area in which the magazine resides. This reflects on readers habits/personality traits and answers the question that most consumers ask themselves as they come across an advertisement, "Are they talking to me?". Such an approach, makes their perception more personalized where the consumer is able to make some type of connection with the product which often leads to an increase in purchasing power.