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The Marketing Edge
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Who are your customers?
Targeting the customer
has never been more important. Making sure that your goods
get into the hands of the people who want to eat and drink
them offers maximum return. Although not a recent phenomenon,
customer targeting has changed dramatically over time.
Early customer targeting was based upon the job title of
the head of the household and classification was based
entirely on the traditional family unit.
Social group:
A - meant that the
breadwinner was upper middle class, higher managerial,
administrative or professional.
B - was ascribed to middle class workers, in intermediate
managerial positions.
C - included skilled manual workers and junior professionals.
D/E - represented the working class, state pensioners and
those at the basic level of subsistence.
As social changes took
place, so home ownership increased, more women began to
work and single people began to live away from home, and
these basic definitions became redundant. A new category
of target customer based upon lifestyles was developed.
Many of these were easy to remember acronyms - TWINKS (twin
income, no kids), YUPPIES (young, upwardly mobile) and
RAPPIES (retired affluent people).
.../contd.
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