Working within resource constraints: a qualitative segmentation study

ABSTRACT

Social marketers are often operating with scarce financial and human resources preventing costly quantitative segmentation methods from being applied. This paper explores the utility of applying qualitative research to identify groups that can be used for social marketing planning and program implementation. Drawing from a single water use case, six focus groups employing a semi-structured discussion guide involving 43 participants who were living and working within the site were conducted. Focus group interviews were audiotaped and manual coding was used to identify major segments within one water use market. Four distinctive segments emerged. The generated segments were denominated comfort users, careless users, price-sensitive users, and contradictory users respectively, with comfort users constituting the largest segment. This paper contributes to the literature by offering a method permitting social marketers operating within limited budgets to apply segmentation. Research limitations and future research directions are outlined.

KEYWORDS:

• Focus group
• social marketing
• qualitative segmentation
• United Arab Emirates

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge the participants in this study for their time and effort, and they thank the University of Sharjah for its support in the data collection process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) received financial support from Griffith University to enable the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.