Market development
 | This article may be in need of reorganization to comply with Wikipedia's layout guidelines. (May 2013) |
 | This article needs additional citations for verification. (March 2013) |
Market development is a growth strategy that identifies and develops new market segments for current products. A market development strategy targets non-buying customers in currently targeted segments. It also targets new customers in new segments.
A market development strategy entails expanding the potential market through new users or new uses. New users can be defined as: new geographic segments, new demographic segments, new institutional segments or new psychographic segments. Another way is to expand sales through new uses for the product.
A marketing manager has to think about the following questions before implementing a market development strategy: Is it profitable? Will it require the introduction of new or modified products? Is the customer and channel well enough researched and understood? The marketing manager uses these four groups to give more focus to the market segment decision: existing customers, competitor customers, non-buying in current segments, new segments.