What is the consumer market?

 The consumer market is the sum total of all the goods and services purchased in a given period by all the inhabitants of a given country or section. Although we refer to the total consumer market as so many dollars worth of goods and services, such totals are useful only for limited sta¬tistical computations. In marketing, we must break down this "consumer market" into its component parts before we can make any analytical or planning use of the figures.
Actually, a consumer market consists of four specific factors or components as follows:
(a)    People.
(b)    Purchasing power.
(c)    Need for a specific product.
(d)    Willingness to fill that need with a given product.
The reader will immediately note that the oft quoted definition that "markets are people" falls short of our marketing definition. A moment's reflection will tell him why. People, just people, without the ability to buy, do not constitute markets. The proof lies in such vast concentrations of people as in India or China where hundreds of millions of people do not purchase in one year what the people of New York alone purchase.
Before you can buy anything in modern-day society, you must have the purchasing power, that is, the money with which to buy it. Marketing people say that people with money to spend constitute potential customers. All these customers together represent a potential market.
Potential is something that is possible as opposed to something actual. It should be understood that even people with a lot of money to spend do not, in themselves, constitute a potential consumer market for a par¬ticular product. People must have a need or want for the product.
Even when we establish the fact that there are people with money to spend and with a desire to buy the type of things we make, we still cannot say we have a market. In a competitive, private-enterprise economy based on consumer choice, a consumer can satisfy his need with a variety of items, many of them quite similar, but not necessarily the one we happen to manufacture and sell.
For example, a well-stocked supermarket may have as many as sixteen brands of coffee available. The reader can easily enumerate more than ten kinds of automobiles. The same is true of detergents, soaps, cereals, and many other items. Another element, therefore, comes into the picture-the willingness of the con sumer to satisfy his need or want with a particular brand or item.
Thus, we see that from the point of view of any one manufacturer, the consumer market is only that segment of the people who can afford to buy his product, who have need for it, and who are willing to buy the product in preference to all similar products sold by other manufacturers.