Market Segmentation

“Biclustering: Overcoming Data Dimensionality Problems in Market Segmentation” by Sara Dolnicar, Katie Lazarevski, both of the University of Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia, Sebastian Kaiser, and Friedrich Leisch, both of Ludwig-Maximilans-Universität, Munich, Germany, was recently published in the Journal of Travel Research OnlineFirst.  Sara Dolnicar gives us some background on the article below:

• Who is the target audience for this article?

Data analysts in industry and academia who conduct market segmentation.

• What inspired you to be interested in this topic?

I have been interested in market segmentation since my PhD in which I investigated the usefulness of neural networks as data analytic technique for market segmentation.

• Were there findings that were surprising to you?

It’s a new method, so there are no surprising insights as such. Instead we are offering a novel method to tackle methodological problems related to market segmentation.

• How do you see this study influencing future research and/or practice?

Hopefully it will improve the methodological quality of research in this area.

• How does this study fit into your body of work/line of research?

Market segmentation methodology is the focus of my research and has been for about 15 years now. Although it is not a new problem that consumers need to be grouped and although methods for market segmentation have been available for a long time, there are still many gaps in the methodological toolbox for market segmentation. I am passionate about trying to fill this gaps bit by bit. This article is another piece of the puzzle.