The book “Market Segmentation Analysis - Understanding It, Doing It, and Making It Useful” is written by Sara Dolnicar, Bettina Grün and Friedrich Leisch. It is published by Springer open access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
The book offers something for everyone working with market segmentation: practical guidance for users of market segmentation solutions; organisational guidance on implementation issues; guidance for market researchers in charge of collecting suitable data; and guidance for data analysts with respect to the technical and statistical aspects of market segmentation analysis. Even market segmentation experts will find something new, including a vast array of useful visualisation techniques that make interpretation of market segments and selection of target segments easier.
The book talks the reader through every single step, every single potential pitfall, and every single decision that needs to be made to ensure market segmentation analysis is conducted as well as possible. All calculations are accompanied not only with a detailed explanation, but also with R code that allows readers to replicate any aspect of what is being covered in the book using R, the open-source environment for statistical computing and graphics.
At a practical level, this book is the result of two decades of cross-disciplinary research into market segmentation facilitated by the research agencies of Australia and Austria. We are grateful to the Australian Research Council (ARC) and the Austrian Science Fund (FWE) for supporting our research programme on market segmentation analysis under ARC project numbers DP0557769, DP110101347, LX0559628 and LX0881890 and FWF project numbers P17382-N12, T351-N18 and V170-N18. Computations were partially run on the Vienna Scientific Cluster (VSC) under approval number 70419. Open access publication was enabled through the FWF grant PUB 580-Z27.
Download the datasets from the book as plain text files in CSV format:
All datasets are also contained in the R packages MSA and flexclust.
The R package MSA is the companion R package to the book which contains data, code and demos to illustrate the examples in the book. The package can be downloaded here from this web page and then installed using
R> install.packages("MSA_0.3-1.tar.gz", repos = NULL, type = "source")To install package MSA directly from this web page please use
R> install.packages("https://homepage.boku.ac.at/leisch/MSA/packages/MSA_0.3-1.tar.gz", repos = NULL, type = "source")Note that packages which
package MSA depends on might
also need to be installed from the Comprehensive R Archive Network
(CRAN) using install.packages(packagename).
All analyses and results presented in the book can be reproduced with R scripts contained in package MSA as demos. These demo files can be run or accessed using for example:
R> library("MSA")
R> demo("step-4")
R> file.edit(system.file("demo", "step-4.R", package = "MSA"))
The demo files are also available from this web page: