CUSTOMER TYPOLOGY

Customer typology

Customer typology

Introduction

The typology of customer posits that ethics (including justice, virtue, and morality) is one of eight kinds of value that may be obtained in the consumption experience. This paper examines ethics as a customer value and its relationship to the other of types customer value and to the framework as a whole. The merits of the typology of customer value are highlighted and the role of ethics within the framework carefully delineated. In particular, the distinction is made between consumption experiences that have entirely altruistic motivations and those experiences that, in addition, have a less selfless aspect. Illustrations of ethics as a customer value are provided, including the consumption of charity services and participation in consumer boycotts. Suggestions are made for research that may benefit from the integration provided by the framework.

In general, typologies divide individuals or objects into groups according to typical behaviour or other patterns and thus contribute to a clearer view of a diverse and confusing number of individuals or objects. According to this perspective, typologies are a line-up of groups whose descriptive features are based on a similarity of distances, and in which the individual types represent part of the totality. In this respect, the typologies can also be interpreted as structured totalities (Hoyer and MacInnis, 2004).

This division of the underlying totality into clearly distinguishable groups of individuals is not an end in itself. Through typologies, aside from providing a clear structure, the causal connection of personality features and behaviour of individuals is typically mapped. As typologies always provide a quantification of classification criteria, typically only the analysis of causal relationships between identified types and target indicators decide the explicative value of the typology (Sydow, 2000).

Discussion

Customer Typology Is Essential For Organizations

According to Wedel and Kamakura (2003) the term consumer typology serves as a collective concept for a number of typological approaches whose objective is the identification of different consumer groups in order to focus marketing activities on consumer segments. The genesis of consumer typologies in the broader sense is based on the methodology that consumers are being described based on several characteristics, and persons similar to each other are being grouped into types (Dillon and Goldstein, 1984).

Strictly speaking, consumer typologies comprise concrete models of advertising agencies, management consultancies, and magazine publishers, which, on the one hand, serve for the identification of distinguishable market segments, and, on the other hand, are to provide support for addressing markets in a segment-specific fashion by applying relevant marketing actions. As a variant of market segmentation, the construction of consumer typologies aims at the identification of different types of consumer groups. Several researchers consider consumer typologies as being equivalent to market segmentation (Blackwell et al., 2001, Brehm et al., 2005).

The concepts of constructing consumer typologies and market segmentation will be considered as synonymous in this study. The details are based on the conceptual understanding of (Sydow, 2000), who describes the construction of consumer typologies as the division of buyers into subgroups as well ...