Abstract
Over the years, much has been written concerning good practice in identifying, sampling and classifying businesses from what we may term the ‘traditional’ business-to-business perspective. In addition, over the past decade we have seen a shift from the old-style industrial business-to-business mode of small-scale desk research and qualitative decision studies, to what were considered as recently as 1987 to be primarily ‘consumer’ techniques: wider-ranging quantitative surveys and business Omnibus methods. Thus, the marketing industry has come to recognise the existence of the business mass market, but, at the same time, good practice has evolved in examining and classifying larger businesses where understanding more complex and diverse decision-making units comes into play. This review paper examines the issues that face researchers in segmenting this wide-ranging spectrum of business markets in ways that meet the modern needs of marketers. Case studies are used to illustrate the key points.
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