ABSTRACT
The relevance and applicability of marketing approaches to the design and dissemination of scientific and technical information (STI) systems is hardly debatable. Market segmentation, as one of the fundamental and most applied theories of the marketing discipline, is thus widely accepted conceptually as one of the key building blocks of any marketing strategy for STI systems. The gap between the conceptual acceptance and practical rejection of the segmentation concept can in part be due to the difficulties involved in implementing a segmentation research program and utilizing the results in the design of STI marketing strategies. The chapter reviews some of these difficulties and suggest some possible solutions. The discussion is organized around the five major research phases: segmentation problem definition, research design, data collection, data analysis, and data interpretation and “translation” of results. The segmentation problem definition stage is probably the most crucial and most neglected area of segmentation.
