Week 7 Reading Reflection

What stood out to me in the reading was that companies and the marketing industry in general is always struggling to find the best way to segment their customers.  I had assumed that marketing strategies had been perfected, when it came to measuring the customer base.  After reading this article, I learned that marketing strategies are always a mystery for companies, as well as marketing segmentation. In this article, the attitudinal type of segmentation confused me the most. Financial sophistication, time spent on investments, and risk tolerance seemed difficult to measure and the results seemed a little unhelpful.  The majority of people spend zero time on investments, so how would you compare this whole group of people? I was also confused as to why effective segmentations only have one or two issues, and why they need to be redrawn after they lose their relevance.  I would ask the author, how do the issues lose their relevance? How do brands measure random acts of purchasing? Do they believe there is a method and reason to all customer purchases?  Do they account for randomness in their calculations and analysis? Overall, I agree with the author that there is no perfect marketing segmentation, as society changes, peoples preferences for purchasing will change.  Societies values can change from spending money on physical items to spending money on experiences such as music festivals and traveling.  I do not think the author was wrong about anything in this article.