In Brenton Chin’s post (https://blogs.ubc.ca/brentonchin/) he explained how it is very important to create a strong bond between the customer and the company. In this post he raised some very good points on how many companies are trying to make an emotional connection to the customer in order to strengthen the relationship. A very good example of this that he used was Apple who can created a whole culture out of their products. Die hard Apple customers (or Apple fanboys) will keep their allegence to Apple no matter what.

Considering these points, I can to a conclusion that creating this time of relationship is greatly associated to a company’s job to segment, target and postion within the market. Since the point of segmenting, targeting and positioning is to have the ability to create a bond with the customer the correlation between the two is evident.

This led my interest towards finding where this is being used, I found many examples of companies creating the bond with customers. However reading articles regarding the 2012 US elections and GOP primaries I realized that these techniques are also being employed. Politicians, much like companies target their customers carefully; however, unlike companies politicians are constantly changing their target market. Currently with the GOP candidates travelling throughout the USA trying to win the Republican nomination they change their views, potential policies and beliefs depending on the state which they find themselves in. Although it may not be news that politicians like to flip-flop on the issues, it may surprise you to know that in many circumstances this does not hurt a candidate, but rather improve the image of the candidate. Due to the popularity of “town hall” style rally’s many voter only react to what the candidate is saying infront of them, and base their decision on this information, disregarding previous statements. This is a great example of segmenting your market and targeting a very small portion of it, making it much easier to create a solid relationship with the voter. Throughout the campaigns of 2012 American politicians will continue to segment their markets in order to target their voters more effectively, and as the campaigns heat up the targeting of potentially supporters will only become more intense.