What is it about?

Market segmentation (targeting product offers on carefully chosen segments of consumers or target markets) is the key to organisational success. Good market segmentation decisions can only result from well implemented market segmentation analysis. But being an exploratory analysis, there are many pitfalls that can reduce the validity of the analysis. This study offers guidance on how to avoid one of these pitfalls: using data containing an insufficient number of data points (typically consumers) as the basis.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

Market segmentation is widely used in academia to create new knowledge and by industry to identify a promising target segment. High quality market segmentation analysis is the key to achieving these two aims.

Perspectives

Improving market segmentation methodology has been one of my key research interests since my PhD. In collaboration with two world-class computational statisticians (Friedrich Leisch and Bettina Grun) we have made quite a few contributions – at least so we think – which reduce the risk of suboptimal market segments resulting from the analysis.

Professor Sara Dolnicar
University of Queensland

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Required Sample Sizes for Data-Driven Market Segmentation Analyses in Tourism, Journal of Travel Research, July 2013, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/0047287513496475.
You can read the full text:

Read

Contributors

The following have contributed to this page