Identifying size, structure, and trends in the market

Once it has discovered the target market, it’s important for a business to learn more about it. It will be necessary to find out the size of the market. Markets can be global or small, or niche. The way the business reaches its target market will be affected by the size. For example, a company targeting a wide market will want to advertise in media with a wide reach such as television or national newspapers, while businesses targeting small markets will use media with a smaller reach such as specialist magazines or local newspapers.

The structure of the market is its demographics. That is, the characteristics of the customers within the target market in terms of gender, age, income etc. Different customers have different needs and wants.

The trends relate to when and how people buy goods or services and being aware of these trends is important for businesses. Long-established businesses have a lot of information about their market trends from their internal sales data. For new businesses, knowing the trends in the market will be more difficult and research will need to be done to find this out – often secondary research.

People's tastes and their decisions in life can change over time, so it’s important to be aware of this. For example, more people have chosen to eat plant-based foods in recent years. Changes like this affect customer buying patterns from the food they buy to the clothes they wear.