Methodological and Strategy Development Implications of Decision Segmentation

ABSTRACT The goal of customer segmentation, the cornerstone of strategy development, is to identify homogeneous groups of customers that will respond in a consistent way to changes in the marketing mix. Interpretation of traditional quantitative segmentation approaches requires an inferential leap as to the underlying decision processes of each segment. Means-end research methodologies address this problem by providing a framework to understand customer decision making that can be directly translated into the specification of positioning strategy that is more personally relevant to a given target consumer group. The quantitative marketing research orientation to means-end research is contrasted to a more qualitative, consumer-decision research perspective. A new methodological procedure that addresses the shortcomings in previous analysis methods to produce decision segments is presented.