This post discusses and quotes from three blogs on page 1 of Goggle’s search results for Target Market.

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Social class segmentation helps you to select and develop the best marketing strategies for your target market. This post provides examples of each using six social classes.

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The 3 largest minority target markets in the United States are African Americans, Asian Americans, and Hispanic Americans. This post provides percent of population, income, and marketing-related information.

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Can you reach your target market provides better with search engines or social sites? If one brings more target market members to your site, then it’s better for marketing your site or blog.

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This post about how media influences society and market segmentation is the second in the series. If you missed the first one, you can link to it below:

How Media Influences Society And Market Segmentation, Part 1

How Media Influences Society And Market Segmentation - 2

The first post covered two ways that media influences society one person at a time.

• Personalities,
• Cognitive structures,

This second post will cover two more ways:

• Affectors
• Motivators, and

The third in this series of posts will cover how inheritance effects how media influences society.

Media Influences Society Differently By People’s Affectors

Affectors include specific needs, beliefs, values, attitudes, and habits of perception that influence the way that people select and filter information. You can read more about how people select information at the link below:

How To Improve The Communication Process With Market Segmentation

Affectors influence how people select information from media just as they do communication from any source. Think of affectors as internal attributes that influence what information that you consider relevant to you and true to your experience of the world.

If a media source provides information that relates to your needs and is consistent with your beliefs, values, and attitudes, you will likely pay attention. If it’s also presented in a way that fits with your habits of perception, that media will likely influence you with its message.

Market segmentation enables a media organization to determine the needs, beliefs, values, and attitudes of its targeted audience. If the organization gets these affectors wrong, the chances of its medium product even reaching the target audience is low. The odds that the medium content will influence the target audience is even lower.

Media Influences Society Differently By People’s Motivators

Media influences society one person at a time and often as a whole because they communicate messages that trigger two types of motivators:

• Inherited biological motivators
• Learned motivators from social experiences

Media Influences Society Differently By People’s Inherited Biological Motivators

Biological motivators include physiological needs like hunger, thirst, and sex. Everyone has these needs, but some people feel then more intensely than other people. How intensely a person feels these needs is due much to how well satisfied they are.

For example, if you haven’t eaten in 24 hours, you’ll feel hunger intensely because your body is demanding that you eat for survival. If you just ate a large meal, the thought of food may make you ill because that biological need is satisfied.

However, some people feel hungry almost all the time. This hunger is psychological rather than physiological, but they still feel it intensely. So hunger is a greater motivator for them than for people who only respond to hunger physiologically.

Market segmentation can help to determine what psychological characteristics increase the intensity of biological needs. When media organizations couple these psychological characteristics with biological needs, their influence increases.

Media Influences Society Differently By People’s Inherited Learned Motivators

Learned motivators can be almost as intense as biological motivators, but they are totally psychologically or sociological. For example, in our society young girls are taught that they have to be thin to be beautiful, and they have to be beautiful to be loved.

This is definitely as example of media influences society. Because the media picture and praise thin and beautiful women, all young girls compare themselves to models and actresses with figures that are natural to only about five percent of women.

So if they aren’t fortunate enough to fall in that five percent, they will try almost any product or service to mold themselves into a form that isn’t natural for them. The media and marketers play on this socially learned need to feel attractive.

So media influences society by teaching people motivations that sell their content and advertising.

Market segmentation is better at appealing to learned motivators than biological ones because socially learned motivators can often be segmented by gender, age, income, education, etc.

If you like this post, don’t miss the third in this series.

How Media Influences Society and Market Segmentation, Part 3

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Posted 2-9-09: How Media Influences Society and Market Segmentation, Part 2

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