There were a few surprises for me in this article. First, I wasn't aware that market segmentation had begun so "long" ago. I think it is amazing that we are still innovating a concept developed in the 1960s. Most concepts from 50 years ago have been about as refined as they can. The second surprising aspect was how basic market segmentation was in the beginning. To advertise to a particular market then involved putting a person that looked like people in the market. To see the advancement of advertising techniques alone is pretty spectacular.
Something that was confusing to me was the laboratory simulation. How does the company doing the simulation take the individual responses and make it into one generalized product. The dog food example targets a specific group, but if there was a product aimed at attracting men and women or people of different race, how would the results be generalized? That would be my first question. My second question would be what was the research that indicated putting a model of the target market segment would work? How did the company know to do this in a world of changing buying behaviors?
I don't think the author was wrong about anything. I don't know enough about marketing and market segments to disagree with him.
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