Bases of supplier segmentation: Perspectives from small-medium sized Asian grocery retailers in Melbourne

In marketing, segmentation is a common means of dividing customers into homogeneous groups for purposes of understanding and servicing the needs of different customer segments. Though less well developed in supply management, segmentation has also been used by large buyers to segregate the heterogeneity of their supply bases into categories with the aim of managing their relationships with different suppliers strategically. A considerable number of supplier segmentation bases have been employed in extant supply management literature to develop directional models, offering prescriptive insights into the strategic planning of supply management activities. The majority of these bases, however, are predetermined, based on either a logic for classification or the tenets of some well developed theories, e.g., transaction cost economics and resource based view. Very little attempt has been made to explore factors underpinning the adoption of different segmentation criteria based on empirical data