Consumer Market Segmentation Research From A Relationship Marketing Perspective

Market Segmentation is a prerequisite for the implementation of a marketing strategy. The introduction of relationship marketing into the consumer market brings brand-new implications for market segmentation.Relationship marketing has achieved tremendous success in theory, but in practice there is a potential risk of failure because many consumers do not seem to have a desire to establish relations with marketers. A key to successful relationship marketing implementation is to choose consumers, which requires to segment consumers.This paper reviews the theories of market segmentation, and indicates its limitations and future research direction. Static and local segmentation are the main features of current segmentation research. Different models segment consumers from the different levels and aspects of psychology, and they lack the grasp of overall consumers' psychology, so it is difficult to coordinate the segmentations for various management tasks to form an efficient integrated marketing power. The outcome of static segmentation cannot analyze the future demand changes of different segmented consumers, or keep up with the trends of lifetime consumers and relationship marketing. Future market segmentation study should be based on a whole system, and take consumers' innate and acquired psychology structural functions for the premise.After confirming the research direction of market segmentation theory, the thesis studies revolution and research direction in market segmentation from the perspective of relationship marketing. In relationship marketing, psychologies are important factors to influence the establishment and maintenance of relations. Consumers' psychologies are divided into innate personality and acquired psychology. Innate personality is relatively stable and acquired psychologies are constantly changing, so consumers' behaviors are also changing constantly. The formations of acquired psychologies are influenced by innate personality and external factors. Therefore, when we segment markets in relationship marketing, we must take into consideration the consumers' innate personalities-acquired psychologies-behaviors relationship, and on its basis, establish dynamic and systemic market segmentation model.Then this thesis constructs a conceptual model. When segmenting markets in the light of relationship marketing, two questions shall be answered: 1. which consumers are willing to establish relationship with the enterprise? 2. which consumers are worth to be connected by the enterprise? Considering these two basic issues, the market segmentation in the light of relationship marketing must segment consumers according to relational willingness and consumers' values. We study consumers' relational willingness from three levels: behavior loyalty—psychological contract—personality trait, and integrate consumers' value into the model as a condition of consumer loyalty. Through the three levels of segmentation variables, consumers are segmented into behaviorally loyal—not behaviorally loyalty, relationally psychological contract—transactional psychological contract, relational proneness consumer—transactional proneness consumer. At the level of consumers' personality traits, we believe consumers' relational proneness could indicate consumers' relational willingness. Using Cattell's 16 personality factors theory, we standardize it. Through literature research, we find that warmth, social boldness; vigilance and independence have correlations with consumers' relational proneness.Finally, we study the operations and possible applications in practice of the conceptual model. In view of the three segmentation variables, we build metrical indicators or scales, which strengthen maneuverability of the model. Then on the basis of the market segmentation model, the thesis proposes the strategies of consumer targeting.