Responsiveness of culture-based segmentation of organizational buyers

Abstract

JADCZAKOVÁ VERONIKA: Responsiveness of culture-based segmentation of organizational buyers. Acta Universitatis Agriculturae et Silviculturae Mendelianae Brunensis, 2013, LXI, No. 7, pp. 2205-2212 Much published work over the four decades has acknowledged market segmentation in businessto-business settings yet primarily focusing on observable segmentation bases such as fi rmographics or geographics. However, such bases were proved to have a weak predictive validity with respect to industrial buying behavior. Therefore, this paper attempts to add a debate to this topic by introducing new (unobservable) segmentation base incorporating several facets of business culture, denoted as psychographics. The justifi cation for this approach is that the business culture captures the collective mindset of an organization and thus enables marketers to target the organization as a whole. Given the hypothesis that culture has a merit for micro-segmentation a sample of 278 manufacturing fi rms was fi rst subjected to principal component analysis and Varimax to reveal underlying cultural traits. In next step, cluster analysis was performed on retained factors to construct business profi les. Finally, non-parametric one-way analysis of variance confi rmed discriminative power between profi les based on psychographics in terms of industrial buying behavior. Owing to this, business culture may assist marketers when targeting more eff ectively than some traditional approaches.