By doing so the marketers will have a better understanding of their target audience and thereby make their marketing more effective (Gunter and Furnham, 1992: 1). This is due to the fact that by using the analytical process that puts customers first, the marketer will get more satisfied customers and thereby gain a great advantage over competitors (Dibb and Simkin, 1996: 3). Market segments can be characterized in different ways on way is to characterize the preferences of the target customers; homogeneous preferences, referring to customers that roughly have the same preferences. Secondly there are diffused preferences which mean that the customers vary in their preferences and finally clustered preferences which mean that the natural market segments emerge from groups of consumers with shared preferences (Kotler and Keller, 2009: 249).
When talking about market segmentation it is necessary to briefly mention the three areas of marketing which is to be taken into consideration when market a product.
The first area is mass marketing. It covers the area of mass producing, mass distributes and mass promotes on product to all buyers (Gunter and Furnham, 1992: 2). However, marketers have realized the great variety in each individual customer and therefore the market segmentation is a helpful tool for the marketers to customize their marketing programs for each individual customer (Dibb and Simkin, 1996: 4). The second area is product differentiated marketing. The marketer produces two or more products that display different features, styles, quality, sizes etc. The third, and dominating, area is target marketing. The marketer distinguishes among a variety of market segments, chooses one or more of the segments and then develops products and marketing mixes customized to each segment (Gunter and Furnham, 1992: 2). In the following the variables used in segmenting consumer markets will be explained.