Objective: research into how people learn has shown that taking time to explore underlying concepts and to generate connections to other information a learner already possesses leads to deeper understanding. The Discussion Forum activities in this course are designed to encourage you to explore and generate these connections.

Marketers can never know enough about a target market, including lifestyle of the consumers. Lifestyle refers to how people spend their time and money; this reflects what consumers think of themselves, and the world. In order to understand how lifestyle impacts purchasing, students need to delve deeper in psychographics and use this to successfully market to specific consumer segments. Strategic Business Insights uses a system named VALS to identify unique consumer segments that are based on an individuals motivations and resources. These consumer segments reflect different wants and needs of various groups of buyers. Understanding psychological profiles can help develop marketing plans. Marketers must be able to understand the lifestyle of different consumer groups. The ability to fully describe a consumer using demographics, psychographics, lifestyle, and behavior is critical to developing successful marketing campaigns for a specific target market segment. Once marketers understand consumers lifestyles, they can correctly meet the consumers wants and need

The VALS framework can help us develop a marketing mix. The marketing mix consists of the marketing managers controllable factorsproduct, price, promotion, and placethat can be used to solve a marketing problem.

Select one of the eight VALS types and develop a high-level marketing mix for this type for a bike company.