marketing is really the study of stereotypes

Considering I just had my marketing mid-term tonight, I figured this was a good chance to post this to my blog.

This is the first marketing class I've had in my MBA program and I like it, a lot! I realized that I actually do a fair bit of marketing in my current job. So not only do I like the class, but it's immediately applicable to stuff I'm working on. In fact, on Monday I was able to put some of the market segmentation stuff into use at work which not helped me do my job but it also helped me study for my exam.

In addition to learning what marketing is not (it's not advertising or trying to sell a product, but more about understanding the needs of customers so that you build something they want or need) I'm starting to understand what marketing is.

Marketing is the study of stereotypes.

More accurately, market segmentation, which is the basis of most marketing decisions, is all about stereotypes. The whole goal of segmenting a market is to figure out who needs your product. (Or to identify certain needs and then go build a product that addresses them.) Hopefully you can then tie those needs to some identifiable characteristics like age, gender, location, education, income, whatever because it's hard to locate customers based on needs. (They don't run around with a sticker on their head that says what they need.) But in this segmentation exercise you typically score different groups on different variables. These groups (or segments) are really just stereotypes. They're groups of people who have a common need or common characteristic. They could be "musicians" or "artists" or "gadget geeks". Admit it, when you read each of those names an image of a typical musician, artist, or gadget geek probably jumped into your mind right? Like for the musician you might have imagined someone carrying a guitar, wearing ripped jeans, relaxed, casual, smoking a cigarette, being the life of a party, and maybe playing music in a cafe. They fit some stereotype.

So to be good at marketing, I think you need to be good at stereotyping or, more accurately, be good at grouping people into segments that need your product.