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20 Lifestyle Segmentation:

From Attitudes, Interests

and Opinions, to Values,

Aesthetic Styles, Life

Visions and Media
Preferences

P a trick Vynck e

Introduction

An organization that decides to operate in some market – whether consumer,
industrial, re-seller or government – must recognize that it normally cannot
equally serve all the customers in that market. These customers may be too numer-
ous, too widely scattered and especially too heterogeneous in their needs and
wants. Recognizing that those heterogeneous markets are actually made up of
a number of smaller homogeneous submarkets, Smith (1956) introduced the
concept of market segmentation – the process of dividing the total market into
several relatively homogeneous groups with similar product or service interests,
with similar needs and desires. From then on, market segmentation became the
core concept of fine-tuned target marketing and communication campaigns.
Of course, many criteria can be used to assign potential customers to homo-
geneous groups. Commonly, these variables are grouped into three general
categories (e.g. Gunter and Furnham, 1992: 4):

• Product-specific, behavioural attribute segmentations classify consumers focusing
upon their purchase behaviour within the relevant product category or the
benefits the consumer expects to derive from a product category.
• General, physical attribute segmentations of consumers, which use such easily
observable criteria as geographic, demographic or socioeconomic variables to
create homogeneous target markets.
• General, psychological attribute segmentations, which utilize profiles of con-
sumers developed either from standardized personality inventories or, more
recently, from lifestyle analyses. This kind of segmentation is often called
‘psychographics’.

Source: EJC (2002), vol. 17, no. 4: 445–463.