Building Customer Profiles

The profiling process starts with the generic product-market. The earlier discussion of six types of supermarket customers illustrates the information often included in customer profile. Of course, a complete profile .has much more detail The product-t; and variant profiles are similar to the generic profiles, although they are more sped about customer characteristics (needs and wants, use situations, activities and interest opinions, purchase processes and choice criteria, and uncontrollable influences on buying decisions).

Normally, product-type analysis considers the organization's product and closely related product types. The marketing strategy issue is deciding which buyers to target within genera product-type, and product-variant markets, and how to position to each target.

The profiles help marketing management make these decisions. More comprehensive analyses are often undertaken in market segmentation analysis which we discuss in Chapter 4