Most Common Types of Markets
The word market originally meant the place where the exchange between seller and buyer took place.
Today we speak of a market not only as a place (the New England market), but also as
a particular type of buyer—for example, the youth market or the motorcycle market.
The phrase share of market refers to the percentage of the total sales in a product category a particular brand has.
The four main market types are (1) consumer, (2) business-to-business industrial (3) institutional, and (4) channel markets.
We can further divide each of these markets by size or geography (local, regional, national, or international).
1.Consumer markets
Consumer markets consist of people who buy goods and services for personal or household use.
a member of the consumer market for companies that sell jeans, athletic shoes, sweatshirts, pizza, music, textbooks, backpacks, computers, education, checking accounts, bicycles, and a multitude of other products that you buy at drug stores and grocery stores, which the marketing industry refers to as package goods (In
Europe these are called fast-moving consumer goods or fmcg.)
2. Business-to-business (B2B) markets
Business-to-business (B2B) markets consist of companies that buy products or services to use in their own businesses or in making other products. General Electric, for example, buys computers to use in billing and inventory control, steel and wiring to use in the manufacture of its products, and cleaning supplies to use in maintaining its buildings. Advertising in this category tends to be heavy on factual content and information but it can also be beautifully designed as Peter Stasiowski’s ads for Interprint demonstrate.
3. Institutional markets
Institutional markets include a wide variety of nonprofit organizations, such as hospitals, government agencies, and schools that provide services for the benefit of society. Universities, for example, are in the market for furniture, cleaning supplies, computers, office supplies, groceries, audiovisual material, paper towels, and toilet paper, to name a few. Such ads are similar to B2B ads in that they are generally heavy on facts and light on emotional appeals.
4.Channel markets
Channel markets the distribution chain, which is made up of businesses we call resellers, or intermediaries. Channel marketing, the process of targeting a specific campaign to members of the distribution channel, is more important now that manufacturers consider their distributors to be partners in their marketing programs. As gi-ant retailers such as Walmart become more powerful, they can even dictate to manufacturers what products their customers want to buy and how much they are willing to pay for them.
Most advertising dollars are spent on consumer markets, although B2B advertising is becoming almost as important. Firms usually reach consumer markets through mass media and other marketing communication tools. They typically reach the other three markets—industrial, institutional, and channel or reseller—through trade and professional advertising in specialized media, such as trade journals, professional magazines, and direct mail, but even more so through personal sales and trade shows and promotions.
Why Is Services Marketing Important?
When some people think about “products,” they only think about goods. This is unfortunate because services are the dominant part of the economy in most developed countries. Health care, for example, is one of the largest industries in the United States and it is a service industry.
Marketing a service-based business, however, is different in a number of ways from marketing goods. For one thing, the product—insurance, banking, travel planning—is often intangible, although some services that “touch things” have a more tangible dimension, such as lawn care, car rentals, restaurants, and dental work. But even those services are not as tangible as buying a car or a video game.
Many goods manufacturers also offer a service—technical advice and setup, parts and repair, financing, and so forth. Most companies have a customer service operation that provides follow-up services for many goods and also answers questions and deals with complaints about products. But it’s more than just customer service. The global media VP at Kraft Foods, for example, refers to Kraft’s iPhone application as providing important “connectivity between consumers, brands, and content that they love.”
Another difference between a good and a service is the relationship between the provider of the service and the customer. In services marketing, the relationship is often closer and more personal than the relationship between a manufacturer and the buyer of its goods. Another difference is that a service usually involves a delivery process that may present many opportunities for messages to be delivered.
