Market Segmentation

Segmenting by needstates and moodstates isn't exactly a new idea but it's definitely becoming more relevant. Food and beverage brands have been doing it for years.

Instead of being loyal to one single brand in a category consumers now adopt a portfolio of brands based on different moods or needs. This report sums it up best by saying:

"...A young beer drinker might have been loyal to just one brand 20 years ago, now he may consider one brand to be his “cool night club beer”, another brand to be his “watching the game on TV beer” and another his “just cut the grass, refreshing beer”."

I'm exploring how to implement this into a digital marketing communication management strategy and how I can use this to segment the very broad LGBT community.

great photo capturing the vibe of Canal Street Manchester

Blog Post 1

Canal Street Manchester

Canal Street’s website, canal-st.co.uk, is a portal providing information to Manchester’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community with an eye towards the LGBT community at-large. Canal Street’s internet presence has already experienced a sizeable amount of success. The site currently generates a weekly e-newsletter for 4100 subscribers and the Facebook page has already amassed 12,000 followers in just over a year with 90% of them being active users!
The client is now looking to capitalise on the success of the Facebook page to draw more users to utilise the website and its services in the hope of generating more traffic to monetise the website. The client also feels the brand would be served well with a mobile strategy but isn’t sure how to proceed.

From here, we came up with n objectives:
• Increase eNewsletter subscribers by 40% within 1 year
• Develop a mobile-friendly website
• Improve usability of the current site

After meeting with the client and receiving feedback from questionnaires we felt the best digital marketing approaches to Canal Street would be social media, mobile browsing, and creating a blog.

From our feedback we learned that LGBT community are keen to adopt new technology. More than 60% of respondents said they used Android, BlackBerry, or iPhone mobile devices. Despite that fact, the current Canal Street website is not friendly to mobile users.

Social media provides a unique opportunity to generate a dialogue with consumers to improve the portal’s current offering and tailor it to provide content that’s more relevant to the audience. An improved social media integration strategy may also generate more traffic by means of ‘shared’ content.

A blog was considered as a means on enhancing the user experience by providing a personal and more authentic tone. Blogging also create another opportunity for user to generate shared content. It’s ability to be self-archiving was viewed a comparable advantage to the e-newsletter. Despite its advantages, we feel that the client doesn’t currently have the resources to actively monitor and update a blog. The client was also concerned about potential negative comments.

Minaxee Prajapati
07129623

Jamal Mon Desir
09262253

Claire Isbister
07296182

Andrew McLoughlin
0629564

Why We're Here

Digital MarComms are the future! Don't believe us? Watch this video...

The Last Advertising Agency On Earth from FITC on Vimeo.

The Ball is Rolling...

Things have started kicking off for us this week! We met the client, Iain, at the bar he co-owns on Canal Street.

We discussed the history of the Canal St website and it's future and where Iain would like to go on holiday! We've amassed pages on pages of notes and currently sifting through them to figure out how to get from here to there with the information we've got. Ironically, all of our note-taking has left us with more questions than answers and searching to define a clear set of objectives to move our project forward.

What makes Canal Street unique is that it's not just a geographic district like The Castro in San Francisco, or Greenwich Village, NYC, but its also very symbolic of  the LGBT community-at-large and the website acts also as a resource. This make devising an inclusive strategy a bit more complicated than we first thought.

It's a laborious process, but if when it gets Iain onto a white sandy beach in the South of France then we'll know that we've done a good job!

Welcome!

We are The PIMMs Group (or PIMMs for short). We're a group of four final year students in the Marketing & Retail division of Manchester Metropolitan University's Business School

As part of our Digital Marketing Communications Management (DMCM) module we are working on a project to develop the online presence of Manchester's famous Canal Street.

Watch this space as we'll be updating it weekly as we progress. It will be like Big Brother but with out the guilty sentiments after.