Agricultural Tractors

The David Brown Company has roots in and around Huddersheld, West Yorkshire. It was at one time best known for the production of high quality gears for use in machinery in a variety of industries. Later, David Brown, the proprietor, was associated with Aston Martin, the world-famous manu¬facturer of sports car saloons. The David Brown Company’s talents, however, were more widely based and it developed expertise in producing agricultural tractors.

The agricultural tractor market is typical of most automotive markets. The majority of sales for products are achieved in export markets throughout the world. The geographic dispersal of markets leads auto¬matically to some form of geographic segmentation. This sometimes disguises the fact that it is the end-use to which the tractors are put, rather than the geographic area itself, which creates the market segmentation. For example, the Canadian and Italian markets are clearly geographically distinct markets, but each of which has a preference for a distinct type of agricultural tractor. The Canadian market requires especially powerful tractors, capable of operating on the prairies with maximum efficiency. In the wine-growing areas of Italy, however, narrow track, low horsepower tractors are required.

David Brown Tractors produces a number of different sized models of varying horsepower capacity. The more powerful tractors are naturally physically larger than the smaller horsepower tractors. Size of tractor required is also associated with the size of fields that tractors have to plough and the number and size of implements which they have to drive, as well as the nature of the terrain which they have to work. Different horsepower tractors, with varying sizes of tracks, are suitable for different uses.

While end-use is clearly the dominant way in which the tractor market is segmented, the market is not without its quirks. The David Brown tractor is very distinctive compared with competitors’ product. The David Brown tractor is white in colour, and considered ‘the white Mercedes of the corn¬fields’. Another interesting point is that despite the obviously utilitarian nature of the agricultural tractor in most world markets many farmers’ exhibit great pride in their ‘iron horses’. It is just as much a status symbol to have a brand new large horsepower tractor parked in full view of neighbours in the farmyard, as it is to have a new Mercedes parked on the drive of a suburban house
II.What other bases of market segmentation do you think agricultural tractor manufacturers could employ?III.Gears are sold to a large number of firms operating in many different industries. What do you consider to be suitable methods for segmenting theses markets?