CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY
In every society, consumers are the most important thing to consider while operating as any business. The satisfaction of these consumers now becomes the firm’s ultimate goal. In order too achieve this market it takes a lot of marketing strategies.
One of such strategies is market segmentation, which is a customer oriented philosophy, since no firm can produce and satisfy the whole market. Therefore, for any firm to produce and market its produce and market its product effectively, it has to identify a sub-market within the aggregate market, select and reach with distinct marketing mix.
Today studies have revealed that a marketer‘s success depends on adequate knowledge of his market product and more specifically on his skills in effecting ownership transfers.
Sales performance uses raw data concerning the number of customers a sales associate speaks to compared with the number of actual sales. It indicates the rate of customer loyalty to the business or a specific employee. Enhancing sales performance can automatically enhance the number of loyal customers.
Sales performance can also indicate whether a department is overstaffed. By comparing the sales numbers based on the monetary amount spent on staffing, managers can determine ideal staffing levels.
1.2 STATEMENT OF RESEACH PROBLEM
An understanding of the meaning of market segmentation on sales performance and it’s impact in serving the different market segments is one of the inherent problems in most organization today. Identifying sub-markets either as a competitive strategy or as a measure to burden the market and promote a product to meet the needs of different customer group is a difficult task.
The marketer is faced with controllable variables like product, price, promotion and distribution as well as uncontrollable variables like competition, economy, consumer demand, technology, socio-cultural environment which summed involves huge financial burden.
The Nigerian Breweries Plc, is an organization where the concept of market segmentation can successfully be applied. What management does is to identify and determine the segments existing in a market, to understand the make-up of segments and their needs.
The strength of all these becomes imperative for marketing managers to focus more of their attention on how best to develop strategies for it’s products, most of these problems on segmentation includes;
1. The need to know whether segmentation is a good marketing strategy on sales performance.
2. Whether it allows firms to develop specific products that really match the market demand.
3. Whether it allows for the development of specific promotional message for each segment of the market.
1 .3 OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY
The specific objectives of the research work are:
To examine the relationship between market segmentation and product development.
To examine the relationship between market segmentation and sales volume.
To ascertain the effect of market segmentation on organization’s profitability.