Consumer segmentation for globalising firms

Consumer segmentation aims at identifying groups of consumers for which it is profitable to design a specific strategy. The cost and the strategic purpose of a segmentation implies to identify lasting segments. This robustness is particularly difficult to achieve nowadays, when billions of consumers from emerging economies are exposed to new consumption and lifestyle models. Consumers' values are often considered for segmentation, because of their personal meaning and of their general concern, However, values have generally been found to be poor predictors of consumers' choices. A new approach of human values is proposed to improve their predictivity without increasing the volume of collected data. It relies on the concept of Overall Value Concern (OVC), that is on the hypothesis that, over time, some people are more concerned with their values than other people. The hypothesis is tested empirically, using both the terminal and instrumental values of Rokeach's Value Survey (Rokeach, 1973). © 2012 by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.Jacques-Marie Aurifeille, Christoper John Medlin and Jaime Gil-Lafuent