Performing market segmentation: a performative perspective

Abstract

Conceptualising market segmentation as performative enhances our knowledge of how marketing frameworks shape marketing practice. Our study addresses the criticism that how marketing is accomplished in practice has yet to be fully articulated. We therefore address the question: ‘How does a market segmentation process emerge in an organisation and what causes it to materialise in this way?’ By constructing market segmentation as performative, we are able to draw insight into the relationships that marketing theories, models, ideas and techniques have with marketing practice. Our longitudinal study allows us to discern four sets of actions organisations can experience as their actors attempt to adopt and adapt a marketing process to the complexities of practice; these are establishing legitimacy, theory embodiment, contextualisation and maintaining the process.

Keywords:

• market segmentation
• performativity
• marketing as practice
• theory
• case study

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Peet Venter

Peet Venter is Professor of Strategy at the Graduate School of Business Leadership at UNISA. His research interests include strategy and marketing processes and practice. He is the editor of three books and has published in the areas of marketing intelligence, customer relationship management and customer retention.

Alex Wright

Alex Wright is Lecturer in Strategy at The Open University Business School, UK. He received his PhD from Nottingham University. His research interests focus on performativity, the communicative constitution of organisation, discourse, strategy as a practice, routines and qualitative epistemologies.

Sally Dibb

Sally Dibb is Professor of Marketing and Director of the Institute for Social Marketing at the Open University Business School. Her research interests are in consumer behaviour, marketing strategy, and social marketing, on which she has published extensively. She has written seven books and has published in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, European Journal of Marketing, Tourism Management, Industrial Marketing Management, Long Range Planning and European Journal of Operations Research, among others.