Ch. 8 - Segmenting and Targeting Markets

The definition of market is people or organizations with needs or wants and the ability and willingness to buy. And the market segmentation plays an important role in marketing products to meet the needs of particular population segments. There are several types of consumers’ market segmentations: geographic, demographic, psychographic, benefit, and usage-rate segmentation. For Whole Foods Market, it mainly focuses on the benefit segmentation. As we all know that, Whole Foods Market is the leading market that selling natural and organic foods. Organic food has become the mantra of consumers who are aware of the dangers of pesticides, chemicals and hormones used in the growing and processing practices of the commercial food industry. Moreover, people are more and more concerned about the calories and nutrition that they take from their meal. Whole foods market mentions that this grouping of customers seeks the healthy benefits from eating these natural and organic foods. For instance, whole foods market produces the low fat foods regarding the situation that people are facing the problem of obesity. People pursue low dat diets for many reasons, including weight loss and disease prevention. Typically, the American diet derives 34% of its calories from fat. Low fat regimens usually prescribe fat intake of 10 to 20% of calories.

For strategies for selecting target market, whole foods market chooses the concentrated targeting. Concentrated targeting strategy used to select on segment of a market for targeting marketing efforts. The main target for whole foods market is college educated people because they are awareness of the important for taking natural and organic foods. So whole foods markets are mainly locates in the place where has large population of high educated people.