Clustering Medical Journal Readership among GPs: Implications for Media Planning

Abstract

The importance of media selection based on media consumption habits has increased over the past two decades, with rising media placement costs coupled with expanding media options leading to fragmented target segments. Media planners spend valuable resources to understand their consumers' relationships with media, but such information is hard to come by for special audiences. This article characterises medical journal readership of 457 general practitioners (GPs) who responded to a mail survey. GPs were clustered on their medical journal readership patterns. Results indicate that there are four distinct groups of medical journal readership, a finding that is of interest to marketing managers in the healthcare industry.

Keywords

cluster analysis general practitioners medical journals readership segmenting

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