- Thread Starter
- #61
I suggest your segmentation needs work. In short, what you propose is 2D when it may be much more. Since you went with 2D, objectivist and subjectivist fit along one dimension nicely. IMO, your nominal and romantic segments struggle to have a comparable fit along another dimension.
Before we expend further effort here, a key marketing rule is to know your audience. Am not sure you have shown why an ASR audience would find much value in a audiophile market segmentation. I acknowledge it may have value in a professional marketing context but much less so here. The marketer in me asks what is your message while the engineer wonders what problem would this really solve?
Rick, you are correct and I've actually already redone it, in about 1/3 the word count to boot. Will sleep on it before publishing. Thanks for the feedback!
To your point I don't think this is actually ultimately a dimensional segmentation (subjectivist vs. objectivist notwithstanding) there are other priorities that I think are equally fundamental but are really orthogonal to objectivism. (the statement ITT about the 'economic audiophile' was a better approach than I had been using before.) I think each category basically comprises a scale of its own.
I'm also not doing real marketing work here, because I haven't done any actual research, for now I'm just summarizing personal observations.
When I used to survey the general public about how they decide what audio gear to buy, the actual values are 1) cost, 2) sound quality 3) opinions of people I trust. I tried very hard to find other ways to convince the public to buy speakers and headphones, but you can't get around those. Real-world segmentation is basically demographic and affinity/psychographic. Targeting different types of audiophile was not something I was in a position to bother with, working in the sub-$500 world.
As for why and who cares: The highest goal here is to throw some water on the hottest arguments that seem to break out incessantly in every and all audio forums, which I assume would be valuable to the readers of ASR.
However, maybe I'm mistaken about it all and there's only one segment: "People who enjoy arguing about electronics".
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