Can Private Brand Buyers be Identified?

Much marketing research in the past ten years has been directed to identifying managerially meaningful and behaviorally sound consumer market segments. Results have, in general, shown that psychological and demographic measures have not been terribly good criterion variables for segmentation. Marketers have attempted to find the deal prone consumer [10], the heavy user [4], new brand buyers [7], and private brand buyers [6]; these market segments represent large areas of economic and marketing effort in the real world. The evidence from these studies has suggested that measures which are more closely tied to purchase behavior would be better predictors. This research attempted to examine buyers or potential buyers of vastly different products to see if meaningful segments could be created using a model of consumer behavior including demographic, product class salience, product use, and marketing attitude variables. Factor analysis, multiple discriminant analysis, and cross-tabulation were used to test the model, and the results were more encouraging than those of similar recent experiments. While economists have been interested in costs of dis-