Marketing Plan

Marketing Plan: Phase II

Annette Ford, Michelle Lorentson, David Rivera Jr.

MKT 421

March 13, 2013

Prof. Howard Kersey

Marketing Plan: Phase II

Marketing is a crucial part of an organization's success. Knowing the target audience to include potential buyers and consumers can essentially project the place and place of the organization's product. The organization's marketing technique should focus on current and future opportunities separating them from their competition. This paper will identify the segmentation criteria that affect the target market selection, identify its target, describe the organizational buyers and consumers for Publix childcare, and analyze the competition landscape possibilities.

Segmentation Criteria

Developing a marketing mix for a specific target market is vital to a company's marketing plan. Managers who do not apply a narrow-down process could cause the business to lose potential customers and miss opportunities by engaging in a mass market campaign. Market segmentation is the most effective way to find opportunities within the market. Market segmentation is a two-step process of naming broad product-markets and segmenting those broad product-markets in order to select target markets (Perreault, 2011). Before targeting a specific market segment Publix must identify the characteristics that make the consumers in the target segment homogeneous and heterogeneous. Consumers who are homogeneous have a similar need for the service and those who are heterogeneous have unique needs. Publix should also determine accessibility of the market segment to various media and distribution channels; distinguish between the different attributes of each market segment; decide if the chosen segment is large enough to warrant a separate marketing program; and finally identify the market segment that responds positively to the marketing programs.

Another variable useful in determining market strategy and the development of the marketing mix are product-market dimensions. These dimensions affect product, place, and the size of target markets. The demographic variables would be effective in assisting Publix in identifying its target market. Demographics variables breaks customers down into categories based on income, age, gender, race, family size, lifestyle, location, and other factors to select target markets and develop marketing mixes (Perreault, 2011). The customers' needs and purchasing behavior are closely linked to the demographic characteristics which make this segmentation criterion indispensable to Publix. The information assembled from the assessments assist Publix in selecting the appropriate target market.

The market for product and services is huge and diverse making it challenging for businesses to be able to gratify every customer. Businesses need to identify a certain set of consumers within a target market and thrive in the direction of satisfying those consumers. Business organizations need to understand