ABSTRACT
Segmentation, or market segmentation, is the dividing of a total market into its constituent parts by some method. Segmentation is not a new concept. It has been around for so long that a countervailing wisdom developed a couple of decades ago that for some products and some services the seller does not need to segment, that segmentation is too expensive of corporate resources to be worth doing and does not gain the firm anything. 1 In the past couple of generations, however, marketers have segmented their markets more often than not—Wilkie and Cohen (1977) discuss research dating from as far back as the mid-1950s. Despite a folkloric view of the 1950s as the golden age of mass marketing when everyone sat in a similar living room and watched Leave It to Beaver on identical television sets, there were, let us remember, three major U.S. car makers at the time, and not everyone used Tide to wash their clothes or brushed their teeth with Colgate toothpaste (I used Ipana). There were several competing products in many categories, and these products had what today we would recognize as differing brand personalities, attracting different kinds of customers; these product categories where, thus, segmented.
