preview

Mcdonald-Market Segmentation

Better Essays
Open Document

MARKET SEGMENTATION: ORGANISATIONAL ARCHETYPES AND RESEARCH AGENDAS*
Mark Jenkins & Professor Malcolm McDonald Cranfield School of Management

Address for correspondence: Mark Jenkins, Cranfield School of Management, Cranfield University, Bedford, MK43 0AL, UK. Tel: +44 (0) 234 751122; Fax: +44 (0) 234 750070 EMail: m.jenkins@cranfield.ac.uk

Paper submitted to the European Journal of Marketing, February 1995. The authors acknowledge the invaluable comments of Professor Martin Christopher and the anonymous referees on earlier drafts of this paper.

*

1

MARKET SEGMENTATION: ORGANISATIONAL ARCHETYPES AND RESEARCH AGENDAS

Summary
The study of how organisations segment their markets has traditionally taken a prescriptive and analytical …show more content…

If the broad market definition requires an understanding of the organisation's capabilities, then should this not also be reflected in the definition of market segments? Secondly, segmentation may also be viewed as a perspective, a way of seeing the

3

market space, as opposed to a proactive process requiring empirical analysis. In this regard organisations can be said to implicitly segment the market into various groups as a way of 'making sense' of their environment. Conventional segmentation theory has, therefore, been founded on conceptual, rather than empirical evidence, based on how organisations should segment their markets, rather than considering how they actually construct homogeneity in the market place. Such frameworks are of undoubted value, but have been criticised for failing to consider the practical issues of how these concepts are implemented in practice within organisations [18]. One potential reason for the evident gap between theory and practice is the prescriptive and analytical approach taken in the literature. A counter-view is expressed by Knight [19] who, as a practising marketing consultant, considers that the market definition of many organisations is often a function of internal factors such as organisational culture and processes: "The idea of markets should be a construct which enables us to simplify and therefore observe and predict consumer behaviour. The practice, however, too often reflects the company's internal issues and

Get Access
Related
Get Access