MARKET SEGMENTATION 131free book to First Book (books for children in need), for every new person who connected to the Cheerios Facebook
page. Cheerios ran the campaign via Facebook’s ‘reach block’, which guaranteed that Cheerios would reach its
target audience over a 24-hour period. The company took advantage of Facebook’s anonymised targeting to target
women over 25 years old.
Several ads were developed: ads to communicate with the Facebook page to ‘help donate a free book’; and ads
to stress the healthful qualities (no artificial flavours or colours) of the cereal.
This campaign resulted in:
z an increase in Facebook connections from 8854 people on the day before the campaign, up to 133 129 after the
first day of the campaign on the ‘reach block’;
z an engagement rate of 0.19% – the highest recorded by General Mills at that time;
z 84.5 million delivered impressions;
z more than 124 000 books donated to First Book.
Facebook has given the brand another way of staying in touch with its target group. Cheerios is convinced that it
can deliver content and messages to its core target of generation Y mums, which they would not be able to deliver
via traditional media. By partnering with its fans, the company is able to tap into the collective intelligence of thou-
sands of mums to gather and share parenting ideas with the entire Cheerios community. The company believes that
real people saying real things can trump traditional brand messages, especially within social platforms. Its ability to
be a catalyst for creating this valuable and authentic content is important for Cheerios.^44 By June 2012, Cheerios
had more than 780 000 fans on its Facebook page.Source : Alamy Images: Michael Dwyer.Segmenting markets using lifestyle or personality criteria is called psychographic segment-
ation. Psychographic research was developed when traditional demographic segmentation was
shown to have strong limitations in predicting consumer behaviour. Lifestyle segmentation
describes how people organise their lives and spend their time and money. Th ese externalM04_PELS3221_05_SE_C04.indd 131M04_PELS3221_05_SE_C04.indd 131 6/5/13 3:00 PM6/5/13 3:00 PM