Differentiated Marketing Strategy: Meaning, Examples and Strategy (2024)

Before launching a product or a marketing campaign, you must decide the target audience. Depending on your product, you can define and categorize your audience based on similar or shared characteristics. After this segmentation, the next step is to target the audience. Targeting includes selecting one or more segments to communicate your brand’s message and offerings with the aim of conversion.

There are three distinct target marketing strategies that businesses can implement:

• Concentrated Marketing Strategy
• Differentiated Marketing Strategy
• Undifferentiated Marketing Strategy

As the article’s title suggests, we will be focusing solely on the differentiated marketing strategy, its benefits and overall strategy implementation. Examples of differentiated marketing strategies will also help us understand its advantages as well as disadvantages.

1. What Is The Meaning Of Differentiated Marketing Strategy?

2. What Are The Features of Differentiated Marketing Strategy?

3. Advantages And Disadvantages Of Differentiated Marketing

4. Difference Between Differentiated and Undifferentiated Marketing Strategy

5. How To Create Differentiated Strategy?

6. Differentiated Marketing Strategy Examples

7. Differentiate Yourself!

What Is The Meaning Of Differentiated Marketing Strategy?

A differentiated marketing strategy can be defined as a marketing strategy that allows you to target different business market segments with separate offerings. Because of this reason, the strategy is also called multi-segment marketing. By following the differentiated marketing definition, we understand that the strategy targets each segment in a particular way, offering unique benefits to multiple segments. The objective is to improve sales and market share across all the segments that you are targeting. There are different differentiated marketing examples, such as businesses that sell organic dog food. With a differentiated strategy, they can target multiple target audiences such as animal lovers, eco-friendly individuals, health-conscious consumers, etc.

What Are The Features of Differentiated Marketing Strategy?

Differentiated marketing can lead to a strong and entrenched market presence that is difficult to displace when implemented successfully. This is because of customers’ great affinity towards different products and offers that cater to the unique demands of their segment.

Here your marketing capabilities and resources play a critical role as they are fundamental in designing different messages for multiple products. The strategy allows you to appeal to two or more clearly defined consumer segments with a particular product and a unique marketing approach tailored for each segment. Additionally, with a differentiated strategy, you can achieve consumer diversification, improve sales and build a strong brand identity in the industry.

Advantages And Disadvantages Of Differentiated Marketing

Differentiation marketing strategy offers several benefits and advantages that help you develop a niche in your industry. Some of the key benefits are listed below:

• Caters To A Range Of Consumer Demands

Using a differentiated marketing approach, you can cater to various consumer demands instead of appealing to just a specific one. An example of differentiated marketing can be a business offering dietary supplements with multiple target audience segments, from individuals looking for specific nutritional supplements to those who prefer general multivitamins. With differentiated marketing, you can reach out and appeal to each target segment separately and cater to their respective demands.

• Scales Up Customer Reach

You can reach more customers by differentiating your marketing approach to sell your products and services. For example, suppose you own a coffee shop with a primary customer base comprising college-going students. You can aim to expand your consumer reach to commuting professionals by diversifying your offerings. Such an approach will allow you to reach a larger audience and improve on business operations.

• Improves Revenues

Combine the two points mentioned above. As you cater to a broader audience and their respective demands, your revenues will naturally go up. As your business increases, so will your profits. That’s why many businesses look to diversify their marketing approaches and develop a variety of offerings for their consumers.

• Makes Your Business Agile

Differentiated marketing can help your brand adapt to changing trends within the industry. With multiple target audiences to cater to, you can ensure future revenues by shifting your focus if one particular segment is no longer viable.

However, as with any marketing strategy, there are also a few disadvantages. Some of the disadvantages are listed below:

• Overall increase in the cost of advertising
• Different customer responses, which may create difficulties in generating definite insights
• Increased levels of competition among players that offer products at lower costs

After understanding the advantages and disadvantages of differentiated marketing, let us understand the difference between differentiated and undifferentiated marketing.

Difference Between Differentiated and Undifferentiated Marketing Strategy

There are some fundamental differences between differentiated and undifferentiated marketing strategies. Organizations that deploy differentiated marketing strategies develop campaigns that attract at least two distinct customer segments. An example of differentiated marketing strategy could be a store promoting sales keeping two different age groups in mind.

Additionally, the approach also uses different messaging in a single campaign for different target segments. For example, a brand can promote the low cost of its product to the budget-conscious segment and superior build and quality of the same product to an affluent target audience.

On the other hand, an undifferentiated marketing strategy allows you to use a single message across your target segments. This approach is similar to mass marketing and allows you to create a message that can influence a large audience. In such cases, the message is primarily more generic or expansive for people to relate to it.

How To Create Differentiated Strategy?

In this section, we will try to get an overview of how to create and implement a differentiated marketing strategy.

• Define your target audience: The most critical step while designing a marketing strategy is to define your key target consumers. For this purpose, you need to figure out your consumers’ main characteristics, such as their location, gender, age, income, marital status, etc. With all the information, you can then group them into different targeting segments.
• Understand the demands of your consumers: The next step in the process is to figure out what exactly your consumer demands. You need to understand what products they like the most and what services help solve their problems. A survey or feedback form can be a good tool to get such information. Additionally, with the use of analytical data, you can track your customers’ purchase habits and target them accordingly.
• Different offers for different segments: As you create your target segments and understand their respective demands, it’s time to develop separate marketing offers or messages. Identify the unique characteristic in each segment and try to promote your offerings that appeal to the character the most.
• Figure out promotional channels: You need to have the proper promotional channels to reach your target audience. If most of your target audience is on social media, creating a specialized email marketing campaign would be futile.

Creating a differentiated strategy involves the steps or pointers mentioned above. We will learn more about the differentiated marketing examples in the upcoming section.

Differentiated Marketing Strategy Examples

There are several successful differentiated marketing examples around us. Let’s have a look at some of them:

Maruti Suzuki

Maruti Suzuki is one of India’s most trusted and popular automakers. The organization deploys differentiated marketing and targets a wide range of consumer segments. It offers different promotional offers for budget-friendly cars such as WagonR or Alto with separate messaging for each product. Similarly, it targets the high-spending consumer segment with promotional messaging for top-line cars like Ciaz, S-Cross, or Baleno.

Bumble

We all know Bumble as a dating app. However, the organization has done a great job differentiating its product range by offering different services for different user groups. Bumble app, known for women making the first move, introduced BFF mode in 2016. The mode allows two people who have swiped right to initiate conversation and form a connection. Similarly, the organization introduced Bumble Bizz that enables business networking on the platform.

Differentiate Yourself!

Differentiated marketing is an effective way to reach multiple sets of potential consumers and target them with unique messaging to increase your sales. With Harappa’s Select A Strategy pathway and other world-class learning modules, you can understand how to leverage such marketing strategies at multiple consumer levels and transform your business. Unlock a new dimension to your business operations, with Harappa, and improve the ROI of your marketing efforts starting today!