Abstract:

Exact knowledge of target groups is necessary for offering products in every market. This implies to structure the market by relevant aspects. The best known and most frequently used procedures to get target groups are structural divisions (regional, demographic) and psychological segmentations/typologies by consumer attitudes. Besides this, under certain circumstances structuring by behavioral data can be useful. But behavioural structuring, previous used, is restricted to compare samples, which are defined before. So it is not taken into account, whether these aspects of behaviour are constant or accidental. The method of configuration frequency analysis (CFA) tries to find groups showing constant behavior without defining these groups ex ante. These behavioural types will be defined ex post and the reasons for their behaviour will be analysed.