Foundation 2: Market segments rarely occur naturally. The exploratory nature of market segmentation leads to a question which has rarely been discussed in marketing or tourism research: are market segments real and is the data analyst’s aim to identify such naturally occurring segment or are market segments an artificial construction of groups for a particular purpose. Different authors take distinctly different positions on the matter. The seminal market structure analysis and market segmentation studies (Frank, Massy, and Wind 1972; Myers and Tauber 1977) imply that the aim of market segmentation is to find natural groupings. More recently, Mazanec (1997) and Wedel and Kamakura (1998) state explicitly that market segmentation typically means that artificial groupings of individuals are constructed.
Empirically both cases can occur and represent to extremes on the continuum of highly structured to not structured data sets. These two extreme options have been referred to as “true clustering” and “constructive clustering” by Dolnicar and Leisch (2001). Figure 2 illustrates the segmentation concepts available to data analysts in dependence of the structure of the empirical data being analyzed.