National Geographic Kids magazine segmentation

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                                National Geographic Kids Magazine Market segmentation

National Geographic kids Magazine is a child focused brand, which features stories and articles about animals, science discoveries, technology, archaeology, geography, games, and activities in every issue (Wikipedia, n.d.). It is the only kids brand with a world-class scientific organization at its core (About us, n.d.).

Selected segmentation bases and attractiveness

For this market segmentation, we decided to take into account some segmentation bases that we think are the most important for the current segmentation issue. First, from the background customer characteristics, we will mainly focus on Demographic and personality bases. Moreover, we will take into account the use of benefits segmentation and also focus on communication behaviour.

Based on a demographic segmentation, we decided to focus on the age characteristic. Our target market are mainly children, both girls and boys, aged from 6 to 12. We chose this age range due to the nature of the magazine, which is mainly based on getting children to discover sciences and nature through short, simple to read and funny articles, ahead with colourful images. These colourful images may get their attention and make them more willing to discover the content of the topic or the magazine in general, especially that these young children around 6 years old generally just learned how to read and are mainly attracted by the images that are presented to them. Older children around 12 may also still be influenced by magazine attractiveness through colours and images, but may be more information oriented, especially that this age period is the beginning of the switch from tweens to teens, which will not get influenced anymore by the “childish” aspect of the magazine.

Based on personality segmentation, we decided to focus on children interested or passionate with sciences or simply animals. As National Geographic Kids magazine is mainly discovery oriented, it is essential for our target market to have some personality characteristics such as curiosity, passion and involvement, in order to take advantage of all the magazine’s benefits and value added. Thus, from a benefits segmentation base, we decided to focus on children who want to get informed about new science discoveries and learn more about animals, in funny and interactive ways that may make them enjoy learning and discovering by themselves. They can even enjoy informing their environment, for example their friends or parents, about what they learned, as a value-added to construct their general culture and enhance their self-confidence.

This may also lead us to take into account a focus on a communication behaviour base, considering the huge potential and ability of children to communicate with their environment about what they liked, hated or learned. This may be an important tool for spreading the word of mouth, and also influencing the purchasing behaviour of the parents, who are potentially the final buyers. Communication behaviour is important for National Geographic Kids Magazine, considering that it is in general one of the most impacting tools for new launches as it is our case for Turkey. A strong positive word of mouth will lead to an increasing awareness of the product, which may positively influence purchasing willingness and therefore sales.

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