Rethinking Business Segmentation: A New Conceptual Model and Perspective

Segmenting business markets is challenging but potentially highly rewarding. An in-depth understanding of how to segment markets is necessary to guide the best decisions leading to profitable targeting. Business markets are changing rapidly due to new technology and a more complex business environment. Current segmentation frameworks are not sufficient to guide business-to-business (B2B), business-to-business-to-business (B2B2B) and business-to-business-to-consumer (B2B2C) marketing analyses and decisions. This paper introduces a new six-cell business market segmentation conceptual model building on two key dimensions – product use by intermediaries in their marketing to their customers (B2B2B and B2B2C) and product standardization. Examples are developed showing how this new typology is used by current marketers and a research agenda is called for to fill the gap in the academic and practitioner literature understanding the new model and business segmentation criteria