| The2008U.S. presidential election has received extensive attention from bothAmerica and abroad, when the first African-American candidate-Barack Obama waselected President. At a time when African-American Civil Rights Movement hadpassed only half a century and racial inequality still more or less existed, why didObama win the presidency? Concerning to this topic, academic fields have conductedhot discussions. And the most frequently mentioned reasons are: firstly, the politicalsituation in2008was favorable to Barack Obama; secondly, Barack Obama wiselyused a new media-Internet; and thirdly, Barack Obama had excellent eloquence.Obviously, all of these helped Barack Obama with his presidential campaign.However, the author attributes Obama’s success to his marketing strategy-marketsegmentation, thinking it was the proper application of this strategy, which satisfiedtargeted voters’ expectations and demands that helped him to success.This thesis consists of three chapters. Firstly, in Chapter One, the author gives asimple introduction about market segmentation, its employment in presidentialcampaigns, and a general looking at the success of Barack Obama’s2008marketsegmentation strategy: he had a clear understanding of himself so that he could findthe best way to segment the voter market-a hybrid of demographic segmentation andpsychographic segmentation. Next, in the following two parts, Chapter Two and Three,the author respectively discusses Barack Obama’s demographic segmentation andpsychographic segmentation in detail, analyzing his corresponding reactions to caterto targeted voters’ expectations and needs, and how these voters responded to him,revealing that it was an appropriate market segmentation that contributed to BarackObama’s election as the first African American president in the U.S. |
