Yuval Golan Professor Riccardo Tiscini

Yuval Golan
Barter Online Platform
8. PROPOSED BUSINESS- MARKET SEGMENT
In order to apply strategy, a company must choose first the potential clientele it will intend to
serve. The company can do so by segmenting the market.
Market Segmentation- dividing the market into distinct groups of buyers who have different
needs, characteristics or behaviors and who night require separate products or marketing programs.
Market Segment- a group of consumers who respond in a similar way to a given set of marketing
efforts.
Major variables that influence categorization of market segments are as follows:
1. Geographic- world region or country, state region, city or metro size, density and climate.
2. Demographic- age, gender, family size, family life cycle, income, occupation, education,
religion, race, generation and nationality.
3. Psychographic- social class, lifestyle and personality.
4. Behavioral- occasions, benefits, user status, user rate, loyalty status, readiness stage and
attitude toward a product.
The requirements for effective segmentation must be measurable, accessible and substantial.
The social networking market can be regarded as comprising of the following two segments:
1. Enterprise Social Networking Vendors- they offer social networking services and tools, which
cater to corporate settings that want firm security policies, and full-bodied organizational
management competence. Notable players in this segment include Telligent, Socialtext,
Oracle, Novell, Microsoft, Jive Software, IBM, Atlassian, and others.
2. Consumer Social Networking Services- these are generally external-face networks that are
often used primarily by consumers, but a lot of businesses and enterprise users are now
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