Segmentation Bases in the Mobile Services Market: Attitudes In, Demographics Out

Abstract

In this paper we present two different segmentations based on the same consumer data, done utilizing the same segmentation method, but with different segmentation bases. We compare these two analyses with regard to their potential to increase our understanding of the elusive mobile services consumer markets, in a situation where few consumers are actual users of mobile services (besides calls and SMS) outside the early adopter category. Our findings are that using socio-demographic segmentation bases yields modest useful information, whereas using attitudes as segmentation base is more informative. In the future, attention should be paid to understanding attitude selection better to yield even more relevant segmentations in the mobile services market, and to discovering whether combinations of different segmentation bases might be the most powerful base to do segmentation upon.