After 17 years of experience as a marketing professor, teaching, doing research, and working with companies, I settled finally on a 9-word imperative to help students understand competitive strategy...

"Place" is an element of the classic four P's in marketing (product, price, place, and promotion), more commonly referred to as distribution. It refers to the methods, strategy, and structure an organization executes to get its offerings to market and into customers’ hands.

The goal of market segmentation is to identify groups of customers who differ in their needs and responses to marketing efforts. This allows businesses to target their strategies to increase effectiveness.

Often, demographic variables are used to segment customers. While demographics describe consumers and business customers, they often offer little insight into those customers’ needs, the benefits they seek, or the true drivers of their purchase decisions.

Effective marketers aim for “the right product, price, and message for the right customer at the right time. Today, technology makes it possible for us to customize and distribute our offerings and messages to very specific, targeted audiences.

“Knowledge of yourself will preserve you from vanity.�? – Miguel de Cervantes

Here’s a case study illustrating why, despite having reasons to be confident in our intuition about how customers view the world, relying on that intuition can lead us astray. (Names have been changed.)