PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

Market segmentation is a widely accepted concept in marketing research and planning (Myers, 1996), and cluster analysis provides a plentitude of techniques frequently employed in determining the characteristics and the number of segments (Wedel and Kamakura, 2000). However, the use of cluster analysis in marketing research has been regarded as less than satisfactory (Dolnicar, 2003). Despite the problems surrounding the application of clustering methods in marketing research, a comprehensive assessment of their basic efficacy is still missing. This empirical study seeks to provide an up-to-date assessment of cluster analysis application in marketing research and to examine the extent to which some of the ubiquitous problems associated with its usage have been addressed by marketing researchers. Therefore, more than 200 journal articles published since 2000 in which cluster analysis was empirically used in a marketing research setting were analyzed.