Company Shirt Strategy Through Lifestyle Segmentation

Thursday, January 8, 2009

The company shirt strategy is one of the best branding campaigns, especially if you have developed a defined segmentation of your target market. By distributing company shirts to your target market, you have made them roaming testimonials that would influence their peers in supporting your brand. But in spite of the clear fit of a company shirt strategy in brand development, many still fail to maximize this marketing approach. One reason is the failure to match the company shirt giveaway to the psychographics of the segment they are targeting.

Psychographics is a market segment with a common descriptive characteristics based on personality traits, lifestyle, or values. Amongst all consumer segmentation, psychographics is the most exact and defined. Thus, this form of segmentation results to the best understanding and connection between the firm and their target segment. Though, the downside is that it is the hardest one to measure and cluster. One way of simplifying this approach is to have some models to build upon in developing your own market niche.

In developing a company shirt strategy, the simplest models to build upon for your psychographic cluster is lifestyle segmentation. The defining characteristics for a lifestyle segmentation are hobbies, interests and other aspects of the consumer's lifestyles. And for our model we will focus on the activity that your market is commonly engaged in. The rationale: different activities would, of course, require different company shirts and apparel. For our lifestyle segmentation, we will be focusing on five major categories, namely leisure, athletic, casual, business, and social.

Leisure = Garments for lounging around, relaxing at home and doing light to moderate work out. Jeans, shorts and sweat pants fall under this category. Mostly informal clothing, company tee shirt and sweatshirts can also be put in this segment.

Athletic = Vigorous activities that require more than the minimal movement require athletic clothing. Jerseys, sports shirts, swim wear are the main components of this lifestyle segment's wardrobe.

Casual = A notch higher than leisure clothing, but not as point-driven as athletics, the casual category is dressier but is still relaxed. Most activities involved in the casual lifestyle are the afternoon and morning events. Lunch with your friends, power breakfast with the boss, church bake sales and picnic in the park are some examples. Clothing could include sun dress for women and polo shirts for men. Most would describe the kind of clothing as business casual or smart casual.

Business = Members of the business lifestyle segment are what you'd call power dressers. Company dress shirts, suit jackets and ties are the usual outfit for men. Tailored skirts, button-down shirts, silk shirts and dresses are what business women wear most.

Social = Social affairs include weddings and dinner parties as well as auctions and charity events. Clothing appropriate for the social segment are cocktail dresses and ball gowns. For men, dress shirts with slacks are the most common outfit.

In today's cutthroat marketing world, there is little room for errors. Precision marketing via lifestyle segmentation can effectively cut back on your unsuccessful strategies. This is especially useful if you are in the development phase of your company shirt strategy. Knowing exactly who your target market is and what they want is the key to lifestyle segmentation. This will help you fine tune your choice of company shirt and give you optimum ROI.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Remy_Lebeau

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