Value Based Segmentation of Luxury Consumption : Behavior among Iranian Employed Women

Luxury market has a continuous growth that proves the increasing demand of luxury around the world despite recession or other similar problems. For this reason luxury concept has been studied from several aspects in different regions around the world; but as the concept of marketing and consumer behavior can be customized based on culture and peoples beliefs and values in every region of the world; local studies are necessary for marketers and business owners in order to penetrate in different markets. In this study the side of the consumer segments and perception of luxury is discussed. The purpose of this study is to explore and describe the luxury value perception among Iranian employed female population and to describe how the value perception can be used as a base for segmentation or in brief it is going to be discussed: 1. How value perception of Iranian employed females in purchasing from luxury brands can be described? 2. What segments can be created based on Iranian employed females’ value perception? By knowing more about Iranian consumers’ value perception, better strategies can be devised and planned; and the results may be useful for the luxury business owners to make decision about based on which values they can attract more customers. This study is performed based on a cross cultural framework which was suggested and examined by Weidman, Hennigs and Siebels (Wiedmann, Hennigs, Siebels, 2007) (Wiedmann, Hennigs, & Siebels, 2009) and therefore 8 hypotheses were presented in this study to be examined. Quantitative approach was chosen as research methodology of this study and Data collection was made by online and printed questionnaires; the number of usable responds in this research is 972. Factor analysis was used to extract the target factors out of defined variables in this study and finally 6 factors were extracted that present perceived values of target respondents. In order to achieve relevant segmentation of the resulted factor in this study, hierarchical, kmean and two-Step clustering process has been conducted based on the factors’ accepted items. The finding of this research shows that the luxury market of Iranian working women is not homogeneous and 3 segments were found based on perceived luxury values