It is the marketing term which is used to segregate the customers or buyers which are of large numbers in order to categorise the demands, buying capacity, movement of products on various heads. It enables the companies to target the customers on different categories and utilise its sales and products.
Thus, the segmentation is classified into basically 4 types which are:
(i) Demographic Segmentation: It is the most common form of segmentation which all the companies use, where it refers to splitting up the customers based on observable, people-based differences which include age, gender, marital status, family size, occupation, education level, income, religion, and nationality.
(a) Age: Teenagers, Adults, Retired.
(b) Gender: Male, Female, Trans-gender.
(c) Marital Status: Married, Unmarried.
(d) Family Size: Joint family, Nuclear family.
(e) Occupation: Profession, Labour, etc.
(f) Education Level: Student, Undergraduate, Post Graduate, etc.
(g) Income level: Below 50,000, 50,000- 2,00,000, above 2,00,000.
(h) Religion: Hindu, Muslim, Christianity, etc.
(i) Nationality: Indian, Australian, etc.
(ii) Behaviouristic Segmentation: In this method, customers are classified based on their knowledge, attitude and use of their actual products.
(iii) Psychographic Segmentation: In this method, the consumers are classified based on their psychological factors which are personality, attitude, life style, etc.
(iv) Geographic Segmentation: It is the simplest form of segmenting people, where people living in a region have a purchasing and consuming habit, which differs from people living in another region. It differs based on the needs of the customer, the population in an area, climatic factors, whether it is a rural or urban area, flow of income, number of villages in that area etc.
