in order to make their products relevant to a variety of consumers companies use Target marketing marketers identify specific segments of the population and position their products to appeal specifically to that segment at McDonald's segmenting is Central to their marketing strategy but the burger giant takes a different approach to segmenting than most companies traditional consumer package Goods companies such as Fredo organize their marketing department by brand and so you will have a brand manager on Doritos or a brand manager on lays etc etc at McDonald's instead of having a brand manager on Big Mac and a brand manager on french fries what we have are segment managers and so at mcdonals you will find a director of young adults a director of women mom a director of africanamerican consumers a director of Hispanic consumers Etc so that structure all by itself puts McDonald's in a position to really maximize targeting marketing efforts in order to Target markets accurately McDonald's uses segment insights insights are information about consumer behavior that are developed through market research we're constantly every day all week long collecting information and data about the different segments that each of our marketing people are responsible um you know are responsible for understanding and what we pull from these segments are insights pieces of information that help us understand how to describe our products in a way that will be most compelling for the particular segment consumer insights focus on the values needs and life style of each segment using these insights each segment team creates a positioning profile for every product then the creative team uses these profiles to produce ads targeted to relevant segments as well as to the general population in the case of our southwest chicken salad we learned from our consumer uh intelligence that this salad presented such a cool variety of ingredients that the General market would find that comp sing so if you look at our ads that were targeted to the General market you'll see the emphasis on the variety of fun things in the southwest chicken salad hi can I get a southwest salad with Crispy Chicken and I want that new thing with the grilled chicken and tortilla strips you know it has that real creamy dressing oh and I think some lettuce on the other hand if you look at the African-American consumer advertising we learned from marketing intelligence that the African-American consumer is less inclined to uh cons consider a salad as a substitute for almost any of the sandwiches we have at McDonald's and so uh instead we needed to develop our message in a way that said to this segment this is a hearty filling interesting and exciting salad if you look at our Hispanic consumer segment the southwest chicken salad is full of ingredients that are that resonate with with culture and Heritage and are compelling ingredients to Hispanic segment for a whole different reason the Asian consumer requirement includes variety of taste and tasting new and different things and so what we presented in our advertising that was targeted to Chinese and Korean Americans was the whole notion of this variety of ingredients and a new exciting taste Target marketing has proven to be very successful for McDonald's by understanding the various consumer segments and positioning their products to appeal to each segment McDonald's has been able to increase overall sales at McDonald's there are a couple hundred people who work full-time just keeping the information current and keeping the information coming so that we can use insights to make certain our marketing is compelling and that our marketing efforts do in fact result in business building Market marketing