ABSTRACT
Marketers typically look for segmentation bases, such as culture, race, ethnicity, gender, and so on, that allow consumers to be placed in homogeneous categories so that specific advertising programs can be targeted to them. Because language is the device most often used to convert private thoughts into public expressions, it has the potential to play a crucial role in the development of our understanding of any market segment. Some psychologists believe that no other activity gives the same sort of insight into another person as does language. In fact, some early psychologists believed that higher mental processes could not be analyzed experimentally; they felt that the only way to understand complex psychological processes was by analysis of cultural products, which put the study of language in a central role (Miller, 1990).
