LAUSR

ABSTRACT The purpose of market segmentation is to develop marketing programs customized to each segment. The purpose of this paper is to develop a high-performance clustering framework for market segmentation and profiling. The context of the paper is global; however, the procedure is equally usable in the international and domestic contexts. The framework consists of four modules. In Module 1 the data preparation is conducted. Module 2 deals with the number of clusters, selection the clustering algorithm and decision about clustering on all data points in a database. Module 3 evaluates the performance of the clustering algorithms and Module 4 is an interactive layer during which the results are analyzed and linked into the experts’ opinion. The high-performance framework was tested with a dataset in the cell-phone market and included data from various country markets (N = 1254). All clustering methods used brought consistent results indicating the validity of the modular approach.