Market Segmentation: How to Do It and How to Profit from It, Revised and updated 4th Edition

Preface and acknowledgements

This book has its origins in a painstaking process of research into the practical difficulties that organizations experience in segmenting their markets, research which we initiated in 1992. We discovered that most of the academic work in this domain is prescriptive, with virtually no pragmatic guidelines provided to enable managers to make sense of the confusing array of data and information available to them.

So we developed a process, which we worked through with some of the best known companies in the world, amending the process until it was sufficiently robust to share with a wider audience. The result was the first edition of this book which was launched in 1995.

Since its launch, the extensive adoption of our market segmentation process by companies ranging from world leaders in their fields to smaller domestic companies has continued to broaden our knowledge base substantially. These insights have enabled us to refine the process, improve the guidelines for its implementation, identify where more detailed explanation is required and, at the same time, develop a quick route through the process for readers looking for a summary of how to implement each step.

The third edition of this book published in 2004 not only built on the improvements introduced into the second edition (1998) with respect to the segmentation process, supporting examples, worked-through case study and worksheets, but also introduced new practical approaches to its implementation, ...