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Home Depot's Marketing Strategies

Decent Essays

Marketing strategies are focused on the customer, and a business has to choose which customers to target. Your product will not be needed by everyone. You will have to figure out which segments of the market to pursue.

There is a huge market for home repair, including professional carpenters and builders. Home Depot’s competitive advantage would not be strong in the market segment composed of professionals, in which the distribution channels are strong and well established. A market segment is composed of customers who have a similar response to a certain type of marketing. Home Depot chose to market primarily to the nonprofessional, private individual.

In the cosmetics industry, one segment reacts positively to luxuriously packaged, expensive …show more content…

Volvo, for example, has established a reputation as a safe, family car. It targets parents with young children. Volvo would have a difficult time also trying to market a two-seat convertible sports car to young adults who are concerned more with style and speed than safety.

The Body Shop is a good example of the success that can result from choosing the right market segment. Founder Anita Roddick disliked paying for expensive packaging and perfuming when she bought cosmetics. She was also annoyed by the extravagant claims made by many cosmetics companies and by the high prices of their perfumes and lotions. Price became an integral part of the image for many products. A brand called Joy, for example, was marketed as the most expensive perfume in the world.

Roddick saw an opportunity to create a different line of cosmetics. She would use natural products that would be packaged inexpensively and marketed without extravagant claims. As she writes in her book, “It is immoral to deceive a customer by making miracle claims for a product. It is immoral to use a photograph of a glowing sixteen-year-old to sell a cream aimed at preventing wrinkles in a

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