You need to understand who your target market consists of and what they think of your business and your product/service. Your target market may be one or more market segments or sub-sets of your market, made up of people or organizations sharing one or more characteristics that cause them to demand similar products and/or services based on qualities of those products such as price or function. Here are 5 critical characteristics which help you understand your favorite customers:
1. Demographics
These are basic identifiable characteristics of individual final consumers and organizational consumers, groups of final consumers and organizational consumers. Demographics are often used as segmentation bases because groups of people, or organizations, with similar demographics often have similar needs & desires that are distinct from those with different backgrounds. They include: age, race, religion, gender, family size, occupation, income level, education level, marital status and others.
2. Geographics
These describe basic identifiable characteristics of town, cities, states, regions, and countries. One, or a combination of factors, such as: size, location, density, climate, transportation network, media, competition, growth pattern, legislation, cost of living, and operations may comprise an identifiable locale.
3. Psychographics
These are any attributes relating to personality, values, attitudes, interests, or lifestyles They are characteristics like social class, family life cycle, usage rate & experience brand loyalty, personality & motives, perceived risk, innovativeness, opinion and lifestyle that determine how a customer thinks of themselves relative to others.
4. Behavioristics
These are variables such as occasion, benefit sought, user status, user rate, loyalty rate, readiness stage, and consumers attitude. They include loyalty, cost, frequency of purchase, amount of purchase, time of year, time involved in purchasing decision, where customer purchases the product.
5. Linguistics
The way language varies in communities of customers. Looks in particular at the interaction of social factors (such as a speaker’s gender, ethnicity, age, degree of integration into their community, etc) and linguistic structures (such as sounds, grammatical forms, intonation features, words, etc). They also include keywords, key phrases, misspellings, regional differences in spelling and pronunciation.
