Segmenting the right segment!!!

In one of the previous posts, we had mentioned about McDonald's franchise business model as one of its very important successful factor. But, only having right model in places does not give you sustainable leading position. Your marketing strategy has to be aligned with your model's insight. It is very important for company to understand its target customers in order to have effective marketing. If company understands its customers well, then only it can communicate with them effectively.

McDonald's is using the same strategy here. They have segmented the customers according to the bases of demographic, psycho-graphic and behavioural. They have segmented their products and positioned according to kids, students, family. They are yet to enter in adults segment specifically. The main purpose of segmenting is to classify market into smaller segments, so that we can serve specific needs of smaller segments with different service and offerings. This segmentation can be done on the basis of age, gender, lifestyle, region, etc.

In India, McDonald's uses segmentations on three different bases:

Demographic - kids, students, family

McDonald's Happy Meal includes toys for kids. It has made the outlets for students of school and colleges easy to hang out with friends. It has also made some different outlets specially for families.

Psycho-graphic - convenience and lifestyle

McDonald's has been very adaptive to cater to the needs of Indian customers. In India, larger population is vegetarian. So, McDonald's came up with products like Mc Veggie burger or Mc aloo tikki to serve the Indian customers.

Behavioural - occasions

McDonald's provides special offerings on birthdays by organizing parties at the outlets. It advises customers to go for the offers to get discounts which in turn change their buying behaviour.

So, in all, McDonald's has been pretty successful in segmenting the market effectively. There is much more scope for them to enter into different segments like adults, professional which they need to work on to enlarge their customer base. But, how much to segment also remains the important question. Only thing which needs to be kept in mind that 'You can't be all things to all people'!!!