Market penetration trumps market segmentation

🌱 Seedling · 1 min

Traditional marketing literature teaches marketers to pick a specific market segment and then position their brand and focus their marketing initiatives to appeal exclusively to that segment. The idea is that consumers identify strongly with the brands they buy, so they will naturally gravitate towards brands that “resonate” more deeply with them. This is called the market segmentation approach to marketing.

However, there’s good evidence that Customer loyalty is behavioral rather than the result of “emotional resonance” between a brand and its customers.

If that’s true, brands should NOT define an overly narrow market segment. Instead, they should build mental availability within the broadest possible set of consumers (which is usually determined by your product’s physical availability, pricing and other fundamental restrictions that would make some customers ineligible), and they should do this with advertising that is consistent and memorable.

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