Consumer needs and wants change with age. Some companies use age and life-cycle segmentation, offering different products or using different marketing approaches for different age and life-cycle groups. For example, Kraft’s Oscar Mayer brand markets Lunchables, convenient prepackaged lunches for children. To extend the substantial success of Lunchables, however, Oscar Mayer later introduced Lunchables Uploaded, a version designed to meet the tastes and sensibilities of teenagers. Most recently, the brand launched an adult version, but with the more adult-friendly name P3 (Portable Protein Pack). Now, consumers of all ages can enjoy one of America’s favorite noontime meals.

Marketers must be careful to guard against stereotypes when using age and life-cycle segmentation. For example, although some 80-year-olds fit the stereotypes of doddering shut-ins with fixed incomes, others ski and play tennis. Similarly, whereas some 40-year-old couples are sending their children off to college, others are just beginning new families. Thus, age is often a poor predictor of a person’s life cycle, health, work or family status, needs, and buying power.

Gender segmentation has long been used in marketing clothing, cosmetics, toiletries, toys, and magazines. For example, P&G was among the first to use gender segmentation with Secret, a deodorant brand specially formulated for a woman’s chemistry, packaged and advertised to reinforce the female image.

More recently, the men’s personal care industry has exploded, and many cosmetics brands that previously catered mostly to women—from L’Oréal, Nivea, and Sephora to Unilever’s Dove brand—now successfully market men’s lines. For example, Dove’s Men+Care line calls itself “The authority on man maintenance.” The brand provides a full line of body washes (“skin care built in”), body bars (“fight skin dryness”), antiperspirants (“tough on sweat, not on skin”), face care (“take better care of your face”), and hair care (“3X stronger hair”).4

Going in the other direction, brands that have traditionally targeted men are now targeting women. For example, in line with the “athleisure” trend in which more women are wearing workout gear as everyday fashion, sports apparel makers and retailers—from Nike and Under Armour to Dick’s Sporting Goods—are boosting their marketing efforts aimed at women buyers. Women now make up half of all sporting good shoppers. Dick’s Sporting Goods recently launched its first-ever ads aimed directly at fitness-minded women, as part of its broader “Who Will You Be?” campaign. The ads feature women who must juggle their busy lives to meet their fitness goals. The first ad in the series shows one mom jogging rather than driving to pick up her sons at school. Another mom jogs on a treadmill while listening to her baby monitor. “Who will you be?” asks the ad. “Every run. Every workout. Every day. Every choice. Every season begins with Dick’s Sporting Goods.” Dick’s want women buyers to know that “we understand the choices that they have to make every single day . . . to fit in fitness,” says the retailer’s chief marketer.5

The marketers of products and services such as automobiles, clothing, cosmetics, financial services, and travel have long used income segmentation. Many companies target affluent consumers with luxury goods and convenience services. Other marketers use high-touch marketing programs to court the well-to-do. Upscale retailer Saks Fifth ­Avenue provides exclusive services to its elite clientele of Fifth Avenue Club members, some of whom spend as much as $150,000 to $200,000 a year on clothing and accessories from Saks alone. For example, Fifth Avenue Club members have access to a Saks Personal Stylist. The fashion-savvy, well-connected personal consultant gets to know and helps to shape each client’s personal sense of style, then guides him or her “through the maze of fashion must-haves.” The personal stylist puts the customer first. For example, if Saks doesn’t carry one of those must-haves that the client covets, the personal stylist will find it elsewhere at no added charge.6

However, not all companies that use income segmentation target the affluent. For example, many retailers—such as the Dollar General, Family Dollar, and Dollar Tree store chains—successfully target low- and middle-income groups. The core market for such stores is represented by families with incomes under $30,000. When Family Dollar real estate experts scout locations for new stores, they look for lower-middle-class neighborhoods where people wear less-expensive shoes and drive old cars that drip a lot of oil. With their low-income strategies, dollar stores are now the fastest-growing retailers in the nation.

Buyers can be grouped according to occasions when they get the idea to buy, actually make their purchases, or use the purchased items. ­Occasion segmentation can help firms build up product usage. Campbell’s advertises its soups more heavily in the cold winter months. And for more than a dozen years, Starbucks has welcomed the autumn season with its pumpkin spice latte (PSL). Sold only in the fall, PSLs pull in an estimated $100 million in revenues for Starbucks each year.8

Still other companies try to boost consumption by promoting usage during nontraditional occasions. For example, most consumers drink orange juice in the morning, but orange growers have promoted drinking orange juice as a cool, healthful refresher at other times of the day. Similarly, whereas consumers tend to drink soft drinks later in the day, Mountain Dew introduced Mtn Dew A.M. (a mixture of Mountain Dew and orange juice) to increase morning consumption. And Taco Bell’s First Meal campaign attempts to build business by promoting Mtn Dew A.M. (available only at Taco Bell) along with the chain’s A.M. Crunchwrap and other breakfast items as a great way to start the day.

A powerful form of segmentation is grouping buyers according to the different benefits that they seek from a product. Benefit ­segmentation requires finding the major benefits people look for in a product class, the kinds of people who look for each benefit, and the major brands that deliver each benefit.

For example, people who buy wearable health and activity trackers are looking for a variety of benefits, everything from counting steps taken and calories burned to heart rate monitoring and high-performance workout tracking and reporting. To meet these varying benefit preferences, Fitbit makes health and fitness tracking devices aimed at buyers in three major benefit segments: Everyday Fitness, Active Fitness, and Performance Fitness:9

Everyday Fitness buyers want only very basic fitness tracking. So Fitbit’s simplest device, the Fitbit Zip, offers these consumers “A fun, simple way to track your day.” It tracks steps taken, distance traveled, calories consumed, and active minutes. The Fitbit One, also aimed at Everyday Fitness buyers, does all that and also monitors how long and well they sleep; the Fitbit Charge adds a wristband and watch. At the other extreme, for the Performance Fitness segment, the high-tech Fitbit Surge helps serious athletes “Train smarter. Go Farther.” The Surge is “the ultimate fitness super watch,” with GPS tracking, heart rate monitoring, all-day activity tracking, automatic workout tracking and recording, sleep monitoring, text notification, music control, and wireless synching to Fitbit’s smartphone and computer app. In all, within Fitbit’s family of fitness products, no matter what bundle of benefits one seeks, “There’s a Fitbit product for everyone.”

Markets can be segmented into nonusers, ex-users, potential users, first-time users, and regular users of a product. Marketers want to reinforce and retain regular users, attract targeted nonusers, and reinvigorate relationships with ex-users. Included in the potential users group are consumers facing life-stage changes—such as new parents and newlyweds—who can be turned into heavy users. For example, to get new parents off to the right start, P&G makes certain that its Pampers Swaddlers are the diaper most U.S. hospitals provide for newborns and then promotes them as “the #1 choice of hospitals.”

Markets can also be segmented into light, medium, and heavy product users. Heavy users are often a small percentage of the market but account for a high percentage of total consumption. For instance, Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s restaurants, both owned by parent company CKE Restaurants, focus on a target of “young, hungry men.” These young male customers, ages 18 to 34, fully embrace the chain’s “If you’re gonna eat, eat like you mean it” positioning. That means they wolf down a lot more Thickburgers and other ­indulgent items featured on the chains’ menus. To ­attract this audience, the company is known for its steamy hot-models-in-bikinis commercials, featuring models such as Kate Upton, Charlotte McKinney, Nina Agdal, and Hannah Ferguson to heat up the brands’ images. Such ads clearly show “what our target audience of young, hungry guys like,” says CKE’s chief executive.10

A market can also be segmented by consumer loyalty. Consumers can be loyal to brands (Tide), stores (Target), and companies (­Apple). Buyers can be divided into groups according to their degree of loyalty. Some consumers are completely loyal—they buy one brand all the time and can’t wait to tell others about it. For example, whether they own a MacBook Pro, an iPhone, or an iPad, Apple devotees are granitelike in their devotion to the brand. At one end are the quietly satisfied Apple users, folks who own one or several Apple devices and use them for browsing, texting, email, and social networking. At the other extreme, however, are the Apple zealots—the so-called MacHeads or Macolytes—who can’t wait to tell anyone within earshot of their latest Apple gadget. Such loyal Apple devotees helped keep Apple afloat during the lean years a decade ago, and they are now at the forefront of Apple’s huge iPhone, iPad, iPod, and iTunes empire.

Other consumers are somewhat loyal—they are loyal to two or three brands of a given product or favor one brand while sometimes buying others. Still other buyers show no loyalty to any brand—they either want something different each time they buy, or they buy whatever’s on sale.

A company can learn a lot by analyzing loyalty patterns in its market. It should start by studying its own loyal customers. Highly loyal customers can be a real asset. They often promote the brand through personal word of mouth and social media. Instead of just marketing to loyal customers, companies should engage them fully and make them partners in building the brand and telling the brand story. For example, Mountain Dew has turned its loyal customers into a “Dew Nation” of passionate superfans who have made it the nation’s number-three liquid refreshment brand behind only Coca-Cola and Pepsi (see Real Marketing 7.1).

Some companies actually put loyalists to work for the brand. For example, Patagonia relies on its most tried-and-true customers—what it calls Patagonia ambassadors—to field-test products in harsh environments, provide input for “ambassador-driven” lines of apparel and gear, and share their product experiences with others.11 In contrast, by studying its less-loyal buyers, a company can detect which brands are most competitive with its own. By looking at customers who are shifting away from its brand, the company can learn about its marketing weaknesses and take actions to correct them.