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Marketing Debate: Is Target Marketing Ever Bad?

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Marketing Debate: Is Target Marketing ever bad?

Target Marketing is defined as the process of segmenting the people based on their tastes, cultural and demographic differences and targeting the section of people for the company’s product. It is one of the critical business process in the success of any company, especially in niche markets. This may involve any kind of age group, any kind of religion or people live in certain areas. But is it unethical to target minorities in particular? It is a part of multi-cultural marketing in identifying different cultures and is important while satisfying their need, for example McDonald’s is the most successful and well know brand which targets more of their products on ethnic minorities in United States. And if we talk about targeting minorities like African Americans, they are doing it to satisfy their particular needs which are different from other ethnic cultures. There is a belief that they love music more, fashion freaks and more particular with quality of the products. Whereas Asian Americans are more brand specific and they believe in savings, education and family traditionalism. So there is strong need of segmenting the markets based on ethnic cultures as well to market for more specific people. It is the core concept of marketing, lack of identification of target markets is a biggest threat to any market. The very most important thing to understand whether there is any difference between target marketing and targeting minorities in particular. If you consider marketing the unhealthy yet addictive products like cigarettes or alcohol, companies will definitely do their research in determining the segment of people that consume these product and what are their preferences and what product would succeed in what areas, just like they do with other products like medicine or healthy products. When some particular

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