A well established marketing principle states that you should ‘segment your market’; meaning that if you can draw a profile of your typical client, you can do a better job of targeting new customers through advertising. However, smaller private companies, such as Options Furniture, operating on a regional basis may need to take a more ‘scatter gun’ approach to maximise their potential market and cannot afford to limit their opportunities by using popular segments, such as age: gender, marital status profession or ethnicity in choosing media in which to advertise their products and services.
Major fitted furniture suppliers, operating on a national basis, may decide that their core client base comprises affluent professionals, aspiring middle class families, single young city dwellers, empty nesters or many more niches and choose to buy advertising space in publications that the target consumers read. Or that may have been the case in the past.
Massive changes in media, particularly the phenomenal growth of the internet, increases in social mobility and family structures present new challenges to all home improvement companies and their advertising and marketing arms. The old ABC demographics may still be relevant in some markets but for a bespoke fitted furniture manufacturer the targeting problems are infinitely more complex than they were.
Options Furniture have an extensive database of old customers going back over 25 years, and if the old principles still held good we would simply look at the postcodes, decide which type of person lives in these areas, what magazines and newspapers they read and direct the media spend accordingly. But life, and marketing, aint that simple any moreSo, who is the typical client for bespoke fitted bedrooms, home offices, living room furniture or home entertainment units and can they be segmented by ethnicity, faith wealth, profession, marital status, geography, social status or their choice of media? In truth; No! All types of people from all walks of life and lifestyles choose to improve their homes by installing fitted furniture.
The only segmentation that may be of some value to Options is the division of the target market by age. We do not collect data on the age profile of our customers and even if we did, the fact that we have old customers returning who we last serviced 20 years ago these would still be shifting sands.
The unreliable but only available data we have on the age demographic of the typical buyer of custom-made, built-in and fitted furniture is purely anecdotal but, hey it is all we have got.
How old is an Options client? Well this is not an easy question to answer but I will attempt to address it in my next post.