Geographic Segmentation

After getting more familiar with target marketing, I’ve decided to elaborate on each type of segmentation in my consumer market. The first type of segmentation I’d like to illustrate is geographic segmentation.

Since I plan on having college students as my main target audience, I need to choose what kind of locations I’d like to primarily advertise my product. I think a great place to begin finding these locations is by using The Princeton Review‘s list of the top party schools in the nation. Considering these schools are have dominant “party cultures,” it’s safe to say that they have a pretty expansive (and prominent) bar scene.

After focusing on these schools, I’d like to target state universities as opposed to small, private colleges. For example, Ohio State University would be excellent places to market my product: the school has a total enrollment of about 63,000 students with a campus surrounded by over 40 bars.

I’d also like to focus on schools with renowned sports programs. Not only do students enjoy drinking at bars during games, but some schools also recently began selling alcohol during sports games in order to gain revenue. In 2011, West Virginia University began selling beer to students of the legal drinking age to earn a profit. According to an article in USA Today, the number of schools selling beer at sporting events is slowly increasing.

Altogether, these factors will help me target my audience geographically and significantly improve sales on my product.

 

Sneezers & Hives

As far as my sneezers and hives, I’ve come to the conclusion that my targeted audience will be men and women between 18 and 25 years old and, more specifically, college students.

And I say this with good reason, especially when considering the question: What do college students do on weekends? Sure, some students study and some stay in, but as far as a campus like Ohio University (with our notorious bars), the bars are wall-to-wall packed on the weekends.

Another reason for my belief that college students will utilize this app is because, oftentimes, college bars tend to have cheaper drinks/ drink specials in order to accommodate a lower-income crowd.

According to a study I found, “…’drink specials’ and other alcohol discounts and promotions remain a common feature of college bars.”

Not to mention, the proximity of bars on college campuses would make them an ideal location for students on the weekends, or week days in many circumstances. A student in another article on drinking claimed, “The proximity and number of bars influence college drinking patterns.” Clearly, the proximity of bars also contributes to the crowds that gather there on the weekends.

I think these are the main factors that will draw my bar-going crowd of 18-25 year olds (we all know the freshman sneak into the bars, hence the 18-year-old minimum age). My app will easily draw in this targeted audience, especially at Ohio University, where drinking at the bars on every night of the week (Pawpurr’s has $.50 drafts on Tuesday… who could refuse?) is more common than texting during class.