The first step in doing international market segmentation is deciding which criteria to use in the task Just as in a domestic marketing context, the marketing analyst faces an embarrassment of riches Literally hundreds of country characteristics could be used as inputsi In a sense, you can pick. and choose the variables that you want. However, for the segmentation to be meaningful, there should be a linkage between the market segments and the response variable (s) that the company is in- terested in. It is not a trivial exercise to figure out a priori which variables will contribute to. the segmentation. Instead, the marketing analyst will need to rely on rror to find the "right" ingredients. Further, information on several segmentation criteria is typically missing, inaccurate, or outdated for some of the countries to be grouped. variables that are most com We now briefly discuss different types of country monly used for country segmentation purposes. Most of these criteria can be used for the two segmentation approaches that we discussed earlier. For instance, one