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MBAB 5P69: Integrated Marketing Communications

Target Market Specification

Research Tips for Defining Target Markets and Market Segmentation

  • What is your customer focus?
    • Consumer Markets
    • Business-to-Business Markets?
  • What is your geographic focus?
    • Local, municipal, or regional?
    • Provincial?
    • National?
    • International?
  • What type of data are you looking for?
    • Demographic (age, gender, income, ethnicity). This data type is the easiest to source.
    • Psychographic (profiles are often proprietary, few free data sources exist, except as noted below)
    • Usage - who are your current customers? 
      • This is internally sourced data (within a company or organization)
      • Potential customers (e.g., new customer segments may be identified via primary or secondary market research).

Best Bets for Canadian Consumer Markets

Best Bets for Canadian Business-to-Business Markets

B2B markets may be segmented by the following methods:

  • by industry (NAICS, SIC, or other industry coding schemes)
  • by size of business (by revenue, by number of employees, etc.)
  • by geographic location
  • by product usage 
  • by customer value

Source: Clow, K.E. (2012). Integrated advertising, promotion, and marketing communications,1st Canadian edition. Toronto, Pearson Canada, p. 103.

Scanning the Industry & Trade Literature

Some valuable marketing data can be gleaned from secondary data sources such as newspapers, or industry and trade magazines. You will need to conduct some focused  literature searches to identify additional information on your target market.

For example, if you are researching the target market for sports drinks or energy drinks (such as Gatorade or Monster), search for:

  • Concept 1: (target market OR market segmentation) AND Concept 2: (brand name OR category name)

Here is search strategy example for the Business Source Complete Library Database

This retrieves articles such as:

Start your research with these Library Databases: