Abstract:

This paper is concerned with perspectives on the use of multivariate techniques in marketing. The marketing concept has taught us to define markets and products in terms of human needs. This has fostered two fundamental segmentation stratagems: brand-benefit segmentation and consumer-benefit segmentation. In addition to benefit segmentation, the marketing concept has stimulated research on basic human needs. This latter development is frequently referred to as psychographic research. In spite of massive efforts at the level of benefits and psychographics, segmentation research has frequently failed to live up to expectations in predicting marketing behavior. The paper introduces the concept of morphological segmentation to aid in the combining of the benefit and psychographic traditions. In addition, morphological segmentation addresses some of the theoretical and practical limitations of market predictability.