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. Usually it is not a trivial exercise to figure out a priori which variables will contribute to. the segmentationIInstead, the marketing analyst will need to rely on trial-and-error 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 Further, information on several segmentation criteria is typically missing, inaccurate, or outdated for some of the countries to be grouped. We now briefly discuss different types of country variables that are most com- 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