It is possible to assume that Powerscourt wanted to innovate and change the old-fashioned style of the festival marketplace. Competition and desire to attract customers persuaded Powerscourt to refurbish the place. Although each customer is a unique individual, marketing managers must think in terms of groups of “average consumers” or prototypes that comprise a more or less homogeneous market segment. Products and services must be developed that appeal to a mass of individuals. Common wants and needs that pertain to the social, regional, educational, economic, psychological, national, or other group interests of a market segment must be recognized and translated into a profitable opportunity. Valuable items such as jewels and precious metals can bear these costs more easily than can low-value items such as lumber and coal.
Variations in product lines and such features as packaging, color, size, style, and variety place a heavy burden on the distribution system. Now more products have to be handled with lower volume per item and higher costs of storage, inventory, and handling. Since markets represent diverse wants and needs, the channels necessary to serve them will continue to be diverse. Shopping centers provide opportunities to plan retailing systems that match environments by varying the mix of each store and of stores in a center. Retail systems have experienced a retailing revolution. Such factors as the shift of population to the suburbs, rising consumer purchasing power, self-service, discount houses, supermarkets, teenage spending, new products such as TV, and increased use of automobiles, have made a marked impact on retailing patterns.
Customers are a heterogeneous group subjected to a multiplicity of forces that affect their attitudes, opinions, motives, desires, wants, needs, and, ultimately, buying behavior. They are individuals and groups, grownups and children, producers and users, families and businesses. The case shows that among the most relevant investigations of consumption are those that focus on behavior as part of the broader sweep of problem-solving situations. They are concerned with cognitive problem-solving by individuals, families, and households and segmenting markets by attitude and behavior rather than solely on a demographic basis. Such approaches have been referred to as psychographics and sociographic paralleling demographics.