[Brielle Buckler]

The process of di­vid­ing a mar­ket into mean­ing­ful, rel­a­tively sim­i­lar, and iden­ti­fi­able seg­ments, or groups, is called mar­ket seg­men­ta­tion. The pur­pose of mar­ket seg­men­ta­tion is to en­able the mar­keter to tai­lor mar­ket­ing mixes to meet the needs of one or more spe­cific seg­ments.</span>

There are sev­eral rea­sons an or­ga­ni­za­tion may de­cide to tar­get their prod­uct(s) and/or ser­vice(s) to one or more seg­ments of the pop­u­la­tion. You can read more about each of the rea­sons listed in our Course Ma­te­ri­als for this unit

For this as­sign­ment, work through this sim­u­la­tion which is part of this unit’s Course Ma­te­ri­als. Imag­ine you are an en­tre­pre­neur work­ing to build­ing your house-made ice cream busi­ness. Based on what you’ve learned, choose a path to im­prove mar­ket­ing ef­forts.

Ex­plain how the path(s) you’ve cho­sen suc­cess­fully (or un­suc­cess­fully) gets your mes­sage to your tar­get pop­u­la­tion, and what ef­fect your mar­ket­ing had on ice cream sales.. Then, speak to the seg­ment­ing vari­ables that you con­sid­ered for this prod­uct/ser­vice (ex: ge­o­graphic, de­mo­graphic, etc.). Why do you think your method was ef­fec­tive or not?

———-

In order to re­ceive full credit for this as­sign­ment, all com­po­nents of this as­sign­ment are due by 11:59pm ET on Fri­day, March 4, 2022. You should first con­tribute a thought­ful post of your own be­fore view­ing/com­ment­ing on the posts of oth­ers. You must re­spond mean­ing­fully to at least two class­mates to re­ceive full credit for this as­sign­ment.

This as­sign­ment is worth a total of ten (10) points — 6 pos­si­ble points for your orig­i­nal post, and up to 2 points for each of the two re­sponses to your class­mates’ posts. Please ref­er­ence our Dis­cus­sion Rubric for more in­for­ma­tion, and to this guide from MSSU to learn more about what it means to re­spond mean­ing­fully to a class­mates’ post.

• This topic was mod­i­fied 3 years, 1 month ago by Brielle Buck­ler. Rea­son: Up­dated Date / Rubric Link
• This topic was mod­i­fied 3 years, 1 month ago by Brielle Buck­ler. Rea­son: Up­dated Date / Rubric Link

[Milena Massoud da Silva]

Ice cream shop

I am an en­tre­pre­neur I am and look­ing for­ward to talk about how I opened my first busi­ness, an ice cream shop!

When we think about suc­cess, the first thing that comes up in our minds is money, but that is not the only thing that de­fines suc­cess, right choices de­fine suc­cess, and that is the first thing we need to keep in mind be­fore open­ing our busi­nesses.

Firstly, I de­cided to tar­get chil­dren, they are the biggest con­sumers of ice cream. So, I can de­scribe my ice cream shop a cozy place for chil­dren, with col­or­ful walls, sofas, and an­i­ma­tions all around, also, I have ice creams with the most vari­able fla­vors, and vari­able col­ors. Chil­dren can choose to eat it in a cup or cone, and of course, add some candy on top.

Talk­ing about seg­ments, one of the things I con­sid­ered be­fore open­ing my busi­ness was the lo­ca­tion, which is right next to a play­ground, so kids can have free ac­cess to visit there for a snack. An­other point that I con­sid­ered was adding some other kids of snacks, be­cause on win­ter time, they can have more op­tions in­stead of just hav­ing ice cream.

I be­lieve my method was ef­fec­tive be­cause I strate­gized on how to make this busi­ness work, and how to be suc­cess­ful, con­sid­er­ing mar­ket seg­men­ta­tion and tar­get­ing.

[Joana Berger]

Open­ing an ice cream shop near a play­ground is a very good idea! Lo­ca­tion can make or break a busi­ness. Not only is your lo­ca­tion a great way to get away from the Sum­mer sun after a long day of play­ing, but it can also be­come a hang­out area for older kids who came to the park with their fam­i­lies but aren’t in­ter­ested in the play­ground. You could even have a lit­tle ice cream cart and walk around the park sell­ing ice cream. See­ing an ice cream cart will def­i­nitely get kids beg­ging their par­ents for ice cream.

[Adrian Ceballos]

I agree putting ice cream closer to kids like parks would def­i­nitely ben­e­fit your busi­ness.

[Horatiu Pui]

Pro­vid­ing the same prod­uct in many other vari­able for­mats in­deed leads to suc­cess. Also, it looks that your main focus is on kids which is a great idea. Kids are high in­flu­encers on the pur­chase de­ci­sion mak­ing seg­ment which in­creases sig­nif­i­cantly the sales. Fi­nally, I would like to men­tion that your de­f­i­n­i­tion of suc­cess makes total sense, and I would add that ” Suc­cess is a jour­ney not a des­ti­na­tion”.

[Desire Acevedo]

I think focus on your place by paint­ing your walls col­or­ful and have an­i­ma­tion will at­tract the tar­get you chose, you thought about the win­ter time when kids may not buy ice cream shop by adding snacks as an­other op­tion. im def­i­nitely with you that your method will be ef­fec­tive.

[Amani Almontaser]

I like the way you focus on chil­dren and talk about how your shop will be ef­fec­tive for them and with all of your pro­vid­ing from hav­ing the choice to choose what ever they like no mat­ter what year sea­son you have other op­tions too.

[Joana Berger]

Mar­ket­ing my Ice Cream Shop

With no for­mal mar­ket­ing, my ice cream shop makes an av­er­age of $17,459 in rev­enue per month. My goal is to in­crease my av­er­age monthly rev­enue by more than 20%.

Step 1. I de­cide to spend $1000 per month on ad­ver­tis­ing on the local free paper. My ad is in the main news sec­tion of the news­pa­per, and it reaches most peo­ple in not only my town but the neigh­bor­ing town as well. Rev­enue grows by about 12.19%.

 

Step 2. I want to con­tinue with the news­pa­per ap­proach, as it reaches a lot of peo­ple. I do a quick sur­vey of the news­pa­per read­ers and how much they now spend at my shop. The re­sults? Those who read the food sec­tion of the news­pa­per are more likely to spend money at my ice cream shop.

Step 3. I focus my ad­ver­tis­ing bud­get on the food sec­tion of the news­pa­per and see an im­prove­ment of 21.05%!

Bonus Sec­tion

A com­peti­tor opens an ice cream store in an­other part of town and mar­kets to food lovers. This re­duces my monthly rev­enue by more than 17.7%!

Step 1. I de­cided to focus on mar­ket­ing to those near my shop with daily sales. Now my rev­enues are only down by 3.13%.

Step 2. I focus on a com­bi­na­tion of peo­ple who are both close and come with their fam­i­lies. My rev­enues are +21.23% over what they were be­fore the com­peti­tor came in.

This re­sults in an out­stand­ing out­come!

Why?

I think fo­cus­ing on mar­ket­ing to those who live near my ice cream shop (by ad­ver­tis­ing in the local free paper and later, with daily sales) made it so that com­ing to my ice cream store be­came a fun habit. Peo­ple now knew what to ex­pect from my ice cream. When a com­peti­tor came in across town, I still focus on those who live near me, know­ing my ice cream shop could still be their hang­out spot or week­end ac­tiv­ity. I want my ice cream shop to be­come a sta­ple in the com­mu­nity, and I think with the mar­ket­ing steps I’m tak­ing, it can be ac­com­plished

[Jesliann Mercado]

Agreed, by mak­ing your ice cream shop sta­pled in a com­mu­nity means the word of your shop will spread amongst the com­mu­nity and hope­fully onto any trav­el­ers.

[Emmalyn]

I think it’s very in­ter­est­ing to read your plan as we took very dif­fer­ent ap­proaches in our seg­men­ta­tion meth­ods.  In this sim­u­la­tion, your focus on ad­ver­tis­ing and ge­og­ra­phy led to over­all bet­ter out­comes by com­par­i­son to my choices that were more de­mo­graphic-fo­cused.

Fo­cus­ing your ad­ver­tis­ing on the food sec­tion of the paper is a great step in ex­pand­ing your cus­tomer reach since it will di­rectly reach those who al­ready have an in­ter­est in the kind of prod­uct you pro­vide.  I think that your plan to focus your mar­ket­ing on your im­me­di­ate ge­o­graphic sur­round­ings is very strate­gic and is a great way to cre­ate brand loy­alty, and al­lows you to have re­turn cus­tomers who will come to you mul­ti­ple times through­out the week due to your prox­im­ity within the com­mu­nity.  This also can let you even ex­pand out­side of the im­me­di­ate, local com­mu­nity too through word of mouth, and they can also po­ten­tially bring other cus­tomers to you.

[Milena Massoud da Silva]

I agree, it is a very in­ter­est­ing idea

[Amani Almontaser]

I agree, it in­ter­est­ing how in your pro­ject you in­cludes many sta­tis­tics that makes it use­ful to un­der­stand and know the salary on how much you will make and how your busi­ness will work.

[Branine Jackson]

As a small busi­ness owner with lit­tle mar­ket­ing ex­pe­ri­ence, it can be tricky to in­crease sales es­pe­cially on a monthly basis. My goal is to in­crease monthly sales by 20%. First I spent $1,000 to mar­ket in local news­pa­pers which only led to a 12.9% due to it’s lim­ited reach. So I de­cided to do deeper re­search into a spe­cific seg­ment such as de­mo­graph­ics. I de­cided to tar­get fam­i­lies and to do so, I spon­sored a few local school sports teams dur­ing the off-sea­son. I also pro­vided the ice cream for a few school so­cials. And I spon­sored the sum­mer ten­nis matches and a few sail­ing teams. This re­sulted in a 20.72% sales in­crease.

Over­time a com­pet­ing shop opened up nearby and caused my sales to de­crease. In order to sus­tain my busi­ness I de­cided to ad­ver­tise to fam­i­lies and lo­cals to pull in more more rev­enue re­sult­ing in a 21.23% in­crease in sales. This was an ef­fec­tive method be­cause I was able to in­crease and sus­tain cus­tomers. I also drove the com­pe­ti­tion away and put my busi­ness in a po­si­tion to last long.

[Jesliann Mercado]

I agree any­thing around a school zone area will pro­vide profit since most chil­dren typ­i­cally enjoy ice cream, re­sult­ing in con­tin­u­ous profit.

[Klaudia Przybyla]

It think it was a good idea to spon­sor a few local school sports teem, and just schools in gen­eral. At the end of the day, kids enjoy ice cream the most.

[Kamila Soopy]

In this sit­u­a­tion, the ice cream shop is bring­ing in $17,459 a month. The goal is to in­crease the monthly av­er­age rev­enue by 20%.

Be­fore look­ing into dif­fer­ent ad­ver­tis­ing meth­ods, I chose to do re­search into the tar­get mar­ket, specif­i­cally the de­mo­graph­ics of the cus­tomers. This re­veals the ma­jor­ity of cus­tomers are fam­i­lies or from higher in­come back­grounds. To tar­get fam­i­lies, the so­lu­tions in­cluded spon­sor­ing a va­ri­ety of sports events as well as pro­vid­ing ice cream for school so­cials; all of which re­sulted in a 20.72% in­crease in rev­enue.

After some time an­other ice cream shop opens up nearby, which leads to a de­crease in sales. As a ma­jor­ity of their cus­tomers are food lovers, the ini­tial step was to at­tract those cus­tomers by chang­ing the for­mula. Though that helped, it wasn’t suf­fi­cient. The next step would be to de­velop new fla­vors for dif­fer­ent fam­ily mem­bers. This com­bines the orig­i­nal fa­mil­ial as­pect along with the new em­pha­sis on taste. These steps lead to an in­crease in the rev­enue and the com­peti­tor de­cides to leave.

[Ferliana Cuadrado]

We had sim­i­lar meth­ods in the way we han­dled the seg­men­ta­tion of our ice cream shops. I like the way you went about things and what you pri­or­i­tized. It was in­ter­est­ing to see what the out­come of the other paths in the sim­u­la­tion were.

• This reply was mod­i­fied 3 years, 1 month ago by Fer­liana Cuadrado.

[Adrian Ceballos]

We all know every­one loves ice cream es­pe­cially around the sum­mer. That is ex­actly why I chose to make a spe­cial fea­ture for the win­ter time called “warm/hot ice cream. My busi­ness ven­ture is meant to tar­get kids and all ages who enjoy sweets. I plan on be­com­ing mobil and putting trucks all through­out the city and shops near schools, parks, and even around malls. I plan on tak­ing small loans in por­tions and mak­ing the money back to ex­pand and pay back. I chose to re­search into that type of mar­ket, an I came across how the biggest tar­get are higher in­come fam­i­lies and also when spon­sor­ing events for sports, birth­day par­ties, or any cel­e­bra­tions. I think my method is great be­cause I mapped out how I will thrive with new lim­ited edi­tion fla­vors, dif­fer­ent lo­ca­tions, be­com­ing mobil (com­ing to you) and mak­ing sure I keep a smile on every­ones face so they would want to come back.

[Edward Quinn]

Haha!  I love the idea of “hot ice­cream” for the win­ter­time!  Win­ter or just cold weather in gen­eral prob­a­bly is very tough on ice cream sales!  Whether it’s a par­tic­u­lar fla­vor that con­notes “warmth” or you ac­tu­ally have some “hot ice­cream,” I think the tongue-in-cheek ap­proach can be a cool mar­ket­ing pitch, es­pe­cially if your seg­men­ta­tion re­search showed you track­ing well with that crowd (per­haps younger, per­haps ed­u­cated and primed for ironic, satir­i­cal type of mar­ket­ing pitches?).

[Horatiu Pui]

My ice cream firm, called Ho­r­atiu’s Ice Cream, was cre­ated and built up by me. The com­pany is lo­cated in Miami, Florida. Its legal form is a Lim­ited Li­a­bil­ity Com­pany since per­sonal as­sets are pro­tected. Nowa­days, there are many ice cream com­pa­nies all over the states, but every store has its own spe­cial­ity in ice cream. In fact, since there are so many com­peti­tors, it is very hard to keep up with them, and pro­vide the best and most con­ve­nient prod­uct. In order to be able to sat­isfy cus­tomers with prod­uct or ser­vice sev­eral facts must be taken in con­sid­er­a­tion, such mar­ket­ing seg­men­ta­tion and tar­get­ing. At the time of build­ing up my busi­ness I paid at­ten­tion to whom I should be mar­ket­ing, why that group of peo­ple, and how it is pos­si­ble to reach them the most easy and ef­fec­tive way. Un­der­stand­ing the tar­get mar­ket I was ready to input money and ef­fort in the or­ga­ni­za­tion. The main seg­men­ta­tions that I con­sid­ered were: ge­o­graphic seg­men­ta­tion – the state of Florida is well known as a place with in­creased tem­per­a­ture where cool­ing prod­ucts are highly fa­vor­able for peo­ple al­most the en­tire year. Also, it is one of the most vis­ited lo­ca­tions by tourists, which is not only sea­sonal. Then I com­bined De­mo­graphic seg­men­ta­tion with De­ci­sion-maker seg­men­ta­tion– look­ing at the char­ac­ter­is­tics of the pop­u­la­tion, it emerged that dif­fer­ent aged peo­ple, but mostly youth, play sig­nif­i­cant roles in the area. So, an ice cream with a 100% nat­ural fla­vor could be pleas­ant, in el­e­vated tem­per­a­ture, at any time of the day or night . Usu­ally, there is a pri­mary buyer, a per­son who makes the final de­ci­sion about what to buy. How­ever, in­flu­encers, for ex­am­ple kids, are not mak­ing the final de­ci­sions of pur­chase, but they highly in­flu­ence the choice of what to buy.
Once the seg­men­ta­tions were in an ac­tion­able place, I de­cided to fol­low a mul­ti­seg­ment strat­egy. Fo­cus­ing the mar­ket­ing ef­forts on more than two seg­ments was ad­van­ta­geous for the com­pany since we were able to serve dif­fer­ent types of cus­tomers with a prod­uct at a very con­ve­nient price, thus in­creas­ing sales. My main goal al­ways was to at­tract as many cus­tomers as pos­si­ble, and make them be­come heavy users. Once the cus­tomer needs are sat­is­fied 100% (low price for high qual­ity) they be­come long term cus­tomers.
After es­tab­lish­ing my tar­get mar­ket, I started to at­tract peo­ple by ad­ver­tis­ing and pro­mot­ing on dif­fer­ent on­line chan­nels, fly­ers, and word-of-mouth. After the busi­ness was sta­ble, in order to in­crease rev­enue, I started dis­trib­ut­ing ice cream all over the city with an Ice Cream truck that had loud­speak­ers call­ing peo­ple to enjoy the dif­fer­ent tastes of my house-made ice cream.
Fi­nally, my mes­sage to the tar­get mar­ket was that I’m able to serve them a price af­ford­able and 100% nat­ural prod­uct. In fact, thanks to the dif­fer­ent right mar­ket seg­men­ta­tion de­ci­sions and to the pro­mo­tions my busi­ness is suc­cess­ful with sig­nif­i­cant yearly rev­enue, and an out­stand­ing profit.

• This reply was mod­i­fied 3 years, 1 month ago by Ho­r­atiu Pui.

[Rechal Kajla]

I think your lo­ca­tion for your store is ideal since it will not be sea­sonal, re­sult­ing in high lev­els of profit all year round.

[Rechal Kajla]

As an en­tre­pre­neur, I am al­ways look­ing for­ward to new chal­lenges and goals. My aim as the owner of an ice cream shop is to en­hance monthly sales by 20%. I started by fo­cus­ing on seg­men­ta­tion, pri­mar­ily de­mo­graphic re­search, and dis­cov­ered that fam­i­lies came to my shop in greater num­bers than any other type of cus­tomer. As a re­sult, I de­cided to pro­mote to fam­i­lies by spon­sor­ing sports teams and ten­nis tour­na­ments. Due to in­creased fam­ily traf­fic, sales in­creased by 20.72%.
To dif­fer­en­ti­ate my busi­ness from the com­peti­tors, I would build a mini play area in the store to keep chil­dren en­ter­tained while also es­tab­lish­ing a bond with the cus­tomers.
I be­lieve my method was ef­fec­tive be­cause not only did it in­crease my rev­enue, but it also made my shop more fam­ily-ori­ented. The de­ci­sion to work on de­mo­graph­ics led to great re­sults in my busi­ness.

[Horatiu Pui]

Build­ing a mini play area in the store for kids in order to in­crease rev­enue is a cool idea. You men­tioned that your cus­tomers in­creased by 20.72% which is a sig­nif­i­cant amount and great, how­ever, did you thought about how to man­age the cus­tomers al­ready in the store and the new in­com­ing ones? For in­stance, what about if  the play­ing area’s ca­pac­ity is for 20 kids, but 15 more are com­ing in or wait­ing for their round, and sup­pos­edly they will buy the ice cream only if they will have the chance to play? Did you planned any­thing? Also, how about the safety mea­sures for kids? Are you tak­ing the re­spon­si­bil­ity for any in­ci­dent oc­cur­ring in the play­ing area?

[Jesliann Mercado]

My Ice cream shop

 

My ice cream shop, called Jess Ice Cream Shop, was cre­ated in New York City and built in the Lower East Side of Man­hat­tan. With no real train­ing in mar­ket­ing, my ice cream shop makes an av­er­age of $17,459 in rev­enue monthly. My over­all goal is to in­crease rev­enue any­where from 10%-20%.First off in a city like New York City, there are a ton of other ice cream shops which means a lot of com­peti­tors. I pay close at­ten­tion to what fla­vors con­sumers may like by giv­ing out sam­ples and build­ing around the com­mu­nity by talk­ing and con­vers­ing with the lo­cals. I pay close at­ten­tion also to the lo­ca­tion of which I chose. Es­pe­cially for the sum­mer when many tourists and trav­el­ers come to travel and visit the city and for the lo­cals out in the hot sum­mer days. By a school as well, prefer­ably a high­school where stu­dents may join and in­vite their friends for a cold treat. I would also spend roughly $1,000 in local ads on­line and fly­ers for peo­ple. I would also re­sort to free in­ter­net apps to ad­ver­tise my shop such as Tik Tok or In­sta­gram. My rev­enue then grows about 12.19%. As I con­tinue to focus on more ad­ver­tis­ing to­wards the youth and any so­cial events the school has, I may be able to pro­vide ser­vice too. By fo­cus­ing pri­mar­ily on the school near my shop my rev­enues are 20.98% higher than what they were with the other local ice cream shops.

 

• This reply was mod­i­fied 3 years, 1 month ago by Jes­liann Mer­cado.

[Rechal Kajla]

I like your con­cept of using so­cial media plat­forms to mar­ket to your con­sumers, es­pe­cially as peo­ple nowa­days rely more on media to lo­cate places to eat.

[Emmalyn]

I think the Lower East Side is a good lo­ca­tion for a smaller ice cream shop due to the fact that it is some­where fre­quented by tourists, and those who live in NYC (whether they di­rectly live in the LES or not).  Fo­cus­ing your fla­vors based on the local com­mu­nity is some­thing that will allow you to have re­turn cus­tomers within a sin­gle work­week, and in an­other way, it will po­ten­tially ap­peal to tourists who are in­ter­ested in the fla­vor in­ter­ests of those who live around your shop.  I also be­lieve that your strat­egy of uti­liz­ing so­cial media to mar­ket your busi­ness is smart since there have been many busi­nesses in NYC that have had an in­crease in cus­tomers/rev­enue due to a video of their busi­ness going viral on Tik­Tok.

[Edward Quinn]

I agree with the so­cial media angle!  I think cre­at­ing con­tent that is fun and easy to “con­sume” is so im­por­tant for a small busi­ness — many busi­nesses have blogs, or do in­sta­gram posts, but if you could be cre­ative with short videos on In­sta­gram and Tik­Tok, I think that could help cre­ate some brand loy­alty and maybe find new cus­tomers as well.  I no­ticed my iPhone ver­sion of YouTube is now setup to flick through videos like Tik­Tok, so this type of quick “shorts” video con­tent is prob­a­bly a great (and free!) way to get some hype out.

[Emmalyn]

As an en­tre­pre­neur work­ing to bring more rev­enue in for my ice cream busi­ness, I de­cided that I need to begin by con­duct­ing re­search and look­ing at some of the stats for who makes up the total pop­u­la­tion of my town.  This leads me to seg­ment my mar­ket based on de­mo­graph­ics.  I then find out that fam­i­lies spend more money in my shop by com­par­i­son to peo­ple who come in by them­selves or with friends.  This leads me to the de­ci­sion that I will tar­get fam­i­lies.

I mar­ket to fam­i­lies through spon­sor­ship and also pro­vide ice cream for a few school so­cials.  I spon­sor local sports teams in their off-sea­son and then spon­sor a few sum­mer ten­nis matches and sail­ing teams.  By plac­ing my prod­uct in this set­ting I’ll be able to ex­pose the taste of my ice cream to new po­ten­tial cus­tomers.  I will also be very likely to see some of my loyal, ex­ist­ing cus­tomers with fam­i­lies (as they make up 30% of my cur­rent cus­tomers). I’m hop­ing this will lead to new, re­turn­ing cus­tomers who are a part of the fam­ily de­mo­graphic.  This de­ci­sion causes me to see more fam­ily traf­fic in my ice cream shop, which im­proves my monthly sale av­er­age by +20.72%.

A com­peti­tor in an­other part of the town then re­duces my av­er­age monthly rev­enue by more than -17.7%, as they tar­get their shop to “food lovers.”  Be­cause of the fact their busi­ness angle is “food lovers,” I de­cided to try to be in even more di­rect com­pe­ti­tion with them by sim­i­larly fo­cus­ing on “food lovers,” and im­prove the qual­ity of my ice cream.  The im­proved ice cream qual­ity sparks some in­ter­est in my cus­tomers and in­creases my monthly rev­enue by +6.1%, but this still leaves me with a -11.6% dis­crep­ancy from where I was prior to the com­pe­ti­tion ar­riv­ing.  Using this tac­tic of im­prov­ing my qual­ity of ice cream in this in­stant re­lies more heav­ily upon word of mouth, as well as ad­ver­tis­ing di­rectly within/by my shop.  Per­haps if I chose a dif­fer­ent way to seg­ment my mar­ket for this choice that would have been more di­rectly in­volved within the com­mu­nity, I would have been able to see a greater per­cent­age in­crease quicker.

I then de­cide I need to also place my focus on fam­i­lies in ad­di­tion to food lovers and de­velop fla­vors spe­cific to fam­ily mem­bers.  Since fam­i­lies were able to in­crease my rev­enue so greatly the first time around through my other mar­ket­ing plans, I am hop­ing that they will also bring in a sim­i­lar rev­enue in­crease again.  I then see an over­all in­crease of +26.06%, which puts me at a +14.46% over my pre-com­pe­ti­tion rev­enues.  This causes my com­pe­ti­tion to make the de­ci­sion to move to an­other town.

I think my de­ci­sion to seg­ment my mar­ket based on de­mo­graph­ics was very ad­van­ta­geous to me con­sid­er­ing how much of my cur­rent cus­tomer base was al­ready made up of fam­i­lies, and how fam­i­lies were likely to spend more money by com­par­i­son to other cus­tomers.  Al­though I slightly changed my angle by de­cid­ing to cater to food lovers, I still kept a focus on cus­tomers who have fam­i­lies, which was able to even­tu­ally get me to a bet­ter po­si­tion over­all.  I think that per­haps some­thing I should have con­sid­ered more is seg­ment­ing my mar­ket based upon ge­og­ra­phy.  If I were to ad­ver­tise to my more im­me­di­ate, local cus­tomers who are in close prox­im­ity to the shop to begin with, I could have po­ten­tially brought in more cus­tomers who I could see mul­ti­ple times through­out the week.  I think that my de­mo­graphic focus was likely to have brought in peo­ple who are more of the week­ender cat­e­gory where I might see them once or twice in the week.  How­ever, since I was able to pro­mote my prod­uct through the schools’ sports teams and other school events, I be­lieve this gave me ex­po­sure to a greater num­ber of po­ten­tial cus­tomers, which still lead to an over­all pos­i­tive out­come.

[Fioriliana Cuadrado]

Hi Em­ma­lyn,

I love how you brought up school events when it comes to the fam­ily de­mo­graphic. I think that was a great way of think­ing be­yond just fam­i­lies but po­ten­tial op­por­tu­ni­ties that those fam­i­lies could bring. Very well done.

[Mariama Diallo]

Ice cream shops are among the most pop­u­lar busi­nesses among both chil­dren and adults. It’s un­der­stand­able be­cause ice cream is one of the most pop­u­lar sweets on the planet. Peo­ple who love to eat ice cream all the time, for ex­am­ple, when you on a date and have a full lunch but want some­thing sweet and cool, they will most likely choose the ice cream dessert. It is more use­ful to start an ice cream busi­ness in a pub­lic spot where peo­ple are avail­able 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It’s smarter to open an ice cream shop in Man­hat­tan be­cause it’s one of the busiest places, and young­sters would get out of school and go down­town to hang out. And be­cause it’s hot out­side dur­ing the sum­mer, a lot of ice cream shops make a lot of money be­cause cus­tomers want some­thing cold.

Open­ing an ice cream shop will be cost you $40,000 or even more be­cause of the Ma­chine and sup­plies and an­a­lyze your prod­ucts/ser­vices but how­ever open­ing a ice cream let’s say­ing down­town Man­hat­tan can Cost a lot of money and it could make a lot of money dur­ing the busiest time of the year like sum­mer time.

To have a good busi­ness I would use my 4 el­e­ment mark­ing mix which is prod­uct, place/Dis­tri­b­u­tion,and pro­mo­tion be­cause they are care­ful ex­am­ined, price tar­get­ing has an im­pact on every el­e­ment of the mar­ket­ing mix re­sult­ing in suc­cess­ful busi­ness. Using so­cial media like Face­book and In­sta­gram to post of the pic­tures too ad­ver­tise busi­ness be­cause it could draw a lot of at­ten­tion from peo­ple all over..

[Edward Quinn]

House-made Ice Cream – Mar­ket­ing Seg­men­ta­tion and Tar­get­ing

I was hav­ing quite a bit of suc­cess run­ning my local Philly based ice cream shop that made some crazy fla­vors in house, with monthly sales av­er­ag­ing $17K, and my take home pay av­er­ag­ing over $4K per month. We have some amaz­ing Philly cream cheese ice cream as well as cheese steak ice cream that my local cus­tomers love. It’s been great, mak­ing money and doing what I love!

Un­for­tu­nately, my wife has been spend­ing quite a large sum of money, and my credit cards are all maxed. I needed to raise sales about 20% to begin using the snow ball method to erad­i­cate these high in­ter­est debts. So, to begin, I knew I needed to con­duct some mar­ket seg­men­ta­tion stud­ies to bet­ter un­der­stand my cus­tomers be­yond their quest for dank Philly ice cream fla­vors. I de­cided to hire a mar­ket­ing seg­men­ta­tion con­sul­tant, and they helped me bet­ter un­der­stand my cus­tomers. I choose to first run some seg­men­ta­tion around the ge­o­graphic com­po­nents, and as I sus­pected, most of my cus­tomers are from the im­me­di­ate local area. That was help­ful, but I still needed to un­der­stand the seg­ments bet­ter.

Next, I seg­mented based on de­mo­graph­ics, and the wiz kid mar­ket­ing con­sul­tants de­ter­mined that not only are the local folks the best at sup­port­ing our lit­tle dream shop, but in par­tic­u­lar, local fam­i­lies and par­tic­u­larly those with high dis­pos­able in­come were com­mon trends. Thus, I em­ployed some grass­roots mar­ket­ing ef­forts aimed at tar­get­ing fam­i­lies through local events such as sport­ing events like ten­nis and sail­ing (these are also con­sumers who, stereo­typ­i­cally speak­ing, may have more dis­pos­able in­come than other types of fam­ily sport events), and this in­creased my sales over 20%!

Un­for­tu­nately, just as I paid off the small­est lit­tle usu­ri­ous credit card bal­ance, a new home­made ice cream ven­dor moved into my neigh­bor­hood from Brook­lyn, cater­ing to “food lovers” and try­ing to poo-poo my cheeses­teak fla­vored ice cream as pedes­trian and worst of all, un­healthy! The nerve. This hurt sales dras­ti­cally, so I dou­bled down on im­prov­ing my qual­ity for the food­ies, as well as mar­ket­ing to fam­i­lies di­rectly and man­aged to im­pact his sales enough that they moved back to NYC. I think this was very im­por­tant to try to un­der­stand the cus­tomer base in terms of de­mo­graphic, as well as the ge­o­graphic fac­tors — in real life, and not just in a sim­u­la­tion, this kind of in­for­ma­tion would be so valu­able to try to im­prove one’s prod­uct, and in­crease sales not only to new cus­tomers but also to your ex­ist­ing cus­tomer base!

[Jaqueline Cap-Waller]

Hi Ed­ward,

First I would like to say great job! You cre­ated a sit­u­a­tion that was very re­al­is­tic.

I think your use of de­mo­graphic and ge­o­graphic seg­men­ta­tion was a great idea and ob­vi­ously worked out well for you. I also agree with you that in a real life sit­u­a­tions that kind of in­for­ma­tion is very valu­able when try­ing to im­prove ones prod­ucts and sales.

[Fioriliana Cuadrado]

Hi Ed­ward,

I re­ally love how you made a story be­hind the sim­u­la­tion. It was very en­ter­tain­ing to read. I agree with you that the sim­u­la­tion was a great way to un­der­stand dif­fer­ent fac­tors, and it was a very valu­able and fun les­son.

[Klaudia Przybyla]

Hello Ed­ward.

Well done! If not for the fact that we are tak­ing the same course, I’d think that your story is true! The de­mo­graphic and ge­o­graphic plan was re­ally good.

[Desire Acevedo]

I am an en­tre­pre­neur of an ice cream shop and my goal is to at­tract more peo­ple to my store, in­crease my monthly in­come by 20% and elim­i­nate the strongest com­pe­ti­tion that is af­fect­ing me by re­duc­ing my in­come. My com­pe­ti­tion is fo­cused on food­ies, so I started doing de­mo­graphic re­search and found that the peo­ple who come to my store are es­pe­cially chil­dren and fam­i­lies, so I tar­get fam­i­lies. i spon­sored some local school sports teams dur­ing the off-sea­son, pro­vided ice cream for some so­cial schools, and spon­sored sum­mer ten­nis games and some mem­bers of the sail­ing teams. I also fo­cused on food­ies, which was the tar­get of my com­pe­ti­tion. I worked with some local dairies to im­prove the qual­ity of my ice cream, de­vel­oped some new and in­ter­est­ing fla­vors aimed at dif­fer­ent mem­bers of the fam­ily, and made more cre­ative shaped ice creams. and vi­su­ally fun and that cus­tomers can com­bine and cre­ate their own ice cream with dif­fer­ent in­gre­di­ents, top­pings, so kids are at­tracted to cre­ativ­ity of the ice creams and I offer more op­tions for my fam­ily and as a re­sult I get a 20.72% in­crease in fam­ily traf­fic , chil­dren and my food­ies and fam­ily focus re­sult in an in­crease of +14.46%. on my com­pe­ti­tion’s in­come forc­ing them to move from a dif­fer­ent town.

[Jaqueline Cap-Waller]

Hi De­sire,

I also used de­mo­graphic seg­men­ta­tion. I found it to be es­pe­cially help­ful in fig­ur­ing out who my cus­tomer base was and i too de­cided to focus on Fam­i­lies. I think your idea of work­ing with local dairies was a great way to im­prove the qual­ity of your ice cream. Mak­ing the en­vi­ron­ment of your shop fam­ily friendly and fun was also a great idea.

 

[Jaqueline Cap-Waller]

As an en­tre­pre­neur with a new house-made ice cream shop, I knew that my goal would be to in­crease prof­its by at least 20%. From my knowl­edge of tak­ing Mar­ket­ing 100, I knew the best way to do this would be to tar­get my prod­uct to one or more seg­ments of the pop­u­la­tion. With total monthly rev­enue of $17,459.00,  I de­cided to con­duct some re­search seg­men­ta­tion to have a bet­ter un­der­stand­ing of my cus­tomer base. Through this re­search, I fo­cused on the de­mo­graphic of my cus­tomers. I learned that fam­i­lies who came to my shop spent more money than any­one else. with this re­search, I de­cided to spon­sor some local sports teams dur­ing the off-sea­son and I pro­vided the ice to a few schools. doing this in­creased the num­ber of fam­i­lies who came through my shop and in­creased rev­enues by 20.72%. I had reached my goal and was very sat­is­fied with my re­sults. I be­lieve that using seg­men­ta­tion re­search helped me in­crease my rev­enues be­cause it gave me in­sight into who my cus­tomer base was. This al­lowed to me in­vest more in the cus­tomers who were bring­ing in the prof­its.

[Fioriliana Cuadrado]

As an ice cream shop owner, I want to in­crease the num­ber of peo­ple who come into my shop and my monthly rev­enues by 20%.

My first step would be to con­duct re­search around seg­men­ta­tion and tar­get­ing. I de­cide to seg­ment the mar­ket by look­ing at my de­mo­graph­ics. This in­cludes age, fam­ily sta­tus, and in­come. I de­cided to do this be­cause I feel like it would be smarter to un­der­stand what is pop­u­lar amongst dif­fer­ent age groups and in­comes to ac­com­mo­date it, which would bring in more profit. As a re­sult of this, I’ve learned that the peo­ple who come into my shop the most are fam­i­lies rather than friends or in­di­vid­u­als.

My next step is to de­cide who I want to tar­get. I de­cide I want to tar­get be­hav­ior in­stead of oth­ers be­cause that is the most prac­ti­cal way. Not every­one has a fam­ily and not every­one is well off. But com­ing into my shop and being a loyal cus­tomer doesn’t re­quire any type of pre­req­ui­site. By doing this, I’ve iden­ti­fied three promis­ing seg­ments: Die-hard fans (sev­eral vis­its per week); Week­enders (come in reg­u­larly on week­ends); Pre cus­tomers (not a cus­tomer now but they might be soon). Of course, I started sec­ond-guess­ing my­self and I de­cided to look at de­mo­graph­ics again. I then re­al­ize I clicked on the same thing and went ahead with tar­get­ing be­hav­ior and using this seg­men­ta­tion.

My next step is to de­cide how to take ac­tion on this seg­ment. I de­cide I want to pro­vide a bet­ter ser­vice. This was my de­ci­sion be­cause I be­lieve that if I pro­vide a bet­ter ser­vice, then more cus­tomers would want some­thing higher qual­ity. I mar­keted this to die-hard fans. If I mar­keted it to them, then more peo­ple would be­come die-hard fans be­cause of the ben­e­fits these fans are get­ting. I de­cide that the best way to raise the qual­ity of the prod­uct is by train­ing em­ploy­ees and giv­ing add on’s. I think this is the best way be­cause I feel like a card would be way too much for an ice cream shop and cre­at­ing a warm at­mos­phere would bring more cus­tomers in be­cause they feel wel­comed.

As a re­sult of my de­ci­sions, my rev­enues in­creased 34.72% to $23,520 per av­er­age month. But un­for­tu­nately, a com­peti­tor opens a rival ice cream store and mar­kets to food lovers. My rev­enue went down by over 17.7%. I com­bated it by mar­ket­ing to fam­i­lies be­cause they come into my shop more often. After try­ing that, my rev­enues are up 6.58% in­stead of down 17.7%. I then de­cide to tar­get food lovers to steal a few of the other shop’s cus­tomers. My food and fam­ily focus re­sulted in my rev­enues in­creas­ing by 14.46%. My com­peti­tor then moved away.

I think my method was ef­fec­tive be­cause I tried to mar­ket to be fair to my cus­tomers but also to be prof­itable for me. I think I made the right de­ci­sions that align with my goals and helped me gain so much rev­enue.

• This reply was mod­i­fied 3 years, 1 month ago by Fio­r­il­iana Cuadrado.

[Ferliana Cuadrado]

We shared sim­i­lar meth­ods in the way we ap­proached the seg­men­ta­tion sim­u­la­tion. The de­scrip­tion you gave on what you did and how you did it was in­ter­est­ing. You did a good job on get­ting the rev­enues up.

[Ferliana Cuadrado]

I am an en­tre­pre­neur at an ice cream shop. My ice cream shop’s rev­enue is 17k which makes my in­come as the owner, 4k. I de­cided that to in­crease my shop as an over­all I would use seg­men­ta­tion and tar­get mar­ket­ing. Using de­mo­graphic tar­get­ing, I looked at who my tar­get de­mo­graphic is, what they enjoy, and can spend (un­like Toys­RUs). My de­mo­graphic let me know that a ma­jor­ity of my de­mo­graphic are fam­i­lies, sum­mer peo­ple, and men. I de­cide that in­stead of de­mo­graphic tar­get­ing, I will do be­hav­ioral tar­get­ing in­stead. Using this form of seg­men­ta­tion, I de­cide I want to offer bet­ter se­vices to this seg­ment. I offer the ser­vice of “train­ing my em­ploy­ees to greet re­turn shop­pers by name, know their com­mon order and offer sur­prise add-ons”. This method in­creased my shop’s rev­enue by a whop­ping 34.72%. To­tal­ing rev­enue to $23,520 per av­er­age month. I now have a rival com­peti­tor. This rival com­peti­tor is fo­cus­ing on food lovers which has made a strong im­pact on my shop cost­ing me lose 17% in rev­enue. I re­tal­i­ate by fo­cus­ing on high in­come fam­i­lies. This sends my rev­enue up to + 15.97%.

[Klaudia Przybyla]

As an Ice Cream Shop owner who makes my own de­li­cious and unique fla­vors, I’d love to find more peo­ple who would enjoy my ice cream. Peo­ple seem to enjoy home­made ice cream more than reg­u­lar ones. I’m a small busi­ness owner in Williams­burg, Brook­lyn. My busi­ness has been quite suc­cess­ful. Un­for­tu­nately, New York City rents have risen a lot since the pan­demic. I’d love to keep my busi­ness run­ning smoothly. I’d like to raise the av­er­age monthly rev­enue by 20%.

The tar­get group I was tar­get­ing was local fam­i­lies.  Ap­prox­i­mately 30% of my cus­tomers come with their fam­i­lies. The neigh­bor­hood is full of kids who love ice cream. Their par­ents take them to our store be­cause every­thing is home­made. We also don’t use any un­nec­es­sary in­gre­di­ents – We keep it sim­ple and healthy. How­ever, I’d love to ex­pand my mar­ket. I wanted to have a bet­ter sense of who is out there, who would love to try my ice cream. Ac­cord­ing to the ge­o­graphic seg­ment, I have de­ter­mined that local adults would also enjoy my shop. Williams­burg is known for its hip­sters. What does this mean? Hip­sters are food­ies who enjoy healthy, home­made foods. Fur­ther­more, they pre­fer to sup­port local busi­nesses over large cor­po­ra­tions.

My first step is to cre­ate a nice In­sta­gram page. Hip­sters are at­tracted to In­sta­gram pages. Be­fore shop­ping at a def­i­nite store, they check out how the place and food look like. I’m going to re­ally focus on the so­cial media side of the busi­ness. A pho­tog­ra­pher friend of mine will visit the store twice a week to take some pic­tures. Then I’ll edit them in Pho­to­shop and post them on our so­cial media plat­forms. Adding an In­sta­gram story every day, as well as post­ing new con­tent three times a week. I’ll re­post any men­tions of my store. That’s what peo­ple like. We also need to men­tion on our so­cial media that our ice cream is home­made, made from sim­ple in­gre­di­ents, and is healthy. Ad­di­tion­ally, we have a vegan op­tion avail­able. I would love to find a local foodie In­sta­gram with a large fol­low­ing that will try our ice cream for free. My goal is to make them love our ice cream, at­mos­phere, and store so they will write about us.

Cre­at­ing a nice space for my cus­tomers is my sec­ond move. I want to at­tract fam­i­lies with chil­dren, as well as hip­sters in the neigh­bor­hood. In­ter­est­ingly, both of them enjoy the same at­mos­phere in the stores. It would be great if my cus­tomers posted pic­tures of their space on so­cial media. I would also love to de­sign a nice out­door space. There are a lot of dog own­ers in this neigh­bor­hood. should be able to sit and enjoy with­out hav­ing to worry about where to leave their dogs.

This was quite a suc­cess­ful de­ci­sion. Ex­pand­ing my mar­ket was a good idea. Though my store is not for every­one, it is not im­pos­si­ble to have more than one tar­get au­di­ence. This is es­pe­cially true when you own an ice cream shop. Fam­i­lies still visit; they love the new out­side area. My hip­sters enjoy spend­ing time out­side and in­side the store with their friends. Thanks to so­cial media mar­ket­ing, I gained a lot of new cus­tomers. Mainly local adults who love healthy food. And who doesn’t like to eat home­made ice cream with sim­ple in­gre­di­ents? If there is some­one, it’s def­i­nitely not some­one who lives in Williams­burg. Gen­er­ally speak­ing, every­thing went well.

[Amani Almontaser]

My Ice Cream Shop!!!!

To open an Ice Cream Shop(busi­ness) I need to think of how to man­age it and where to op­er­ate it as a small lo­ca­tion that will pro­vide a wide se­lec­tion first and make the busi­ness work.

 

Man­age­ment is com­mit­ted to pro­vid­ing cus­tomers with qual­ity ice cream, smooth­ies, and bev­er­ages at rea­son­able prices while con­form­ing to all laws re­gard­ing the sale of food on both the state and local lev­els.

 

My shop will be in Miami, FL with an in­door and an out­door set­ting. I chose this lo­ca­tion be­cause it has the most gen­er­a­tion that goes for va­ca­tion mostly and the weather is sunny which is needed and ice cream to cool down. Also, the art of my busi­ness is joy­ful for con­sumers with a lot of ice cream draw­ing an­i­ma­tions, a quiet place with a low vol­ume of joy music, and col­or­ful walls and chairs. Peo­ple have the choice to play any music they want but have to be re­lated to the place from joy and hap­pi­ness.

 

Con­vinc­ing peo­ple to buy;

Ask­ing them what they are al­ler­gic to be­fore or­der­ing to make sure I don’t hurt peo­ple.

-First, pro­vide many fla­vors with dif­fer­ent col­ors of ice cream kinds

-Sec­ond, smooth­ies

-Third, frozen yo­gurt

-Fourth, peo­ple have the op­tion to choose from a cone, cup, or other form pro­vided.

-Last, it will be waf­fles that in­clude the fla­vors of the ice cream in­side.

 

Who I will be sell­ing it to > Two groups

•  First fam­i­lies buy for their chil­dren the most: this group not only gen­er­ates a large vol­ume of im­me­di­ate busi­ness but also cre­ates long-term cus­tomers in the chil­dren and they have a choice to go out for ice cream more often. they all have chil­dren so tac­tics that are geared to­wards mar­kets that re­late to chil­dren or the chil­dren them­selves may pro­vide highly ef­fec­tive in gen­er­at­ing trial,.

 

•  an 18-24-year-old: half col­lege stu­dents & half res­i­dents be­cause they tend to spend more than they could af­ford pres­tige prod­ucts. They’re reach­able through music and they refer to pres­tige prod­ucts which match our choice of prod­uct of­fer­ing.

My busi­ness will work well be­cause what I did is what every­one wishes for and con­vinc­ing con­sumers the most in a good way makes the mar­ket­ing go as planned to have a suc­cess­ful busi­ness.

 

• This reply was mod­i­fied 3 years ago by Amani Al­montaser.
• This reply was mod­i­fied 3 years ago by Amani Al­montaser.

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