A key technique intended to provide an enhanced focus for marketing activities and research exercises, based on sub-dividing the wider market into discrete and identifiable sub-sets. Writer Alan Tapp [1998]  describes this process as: ‘Splitting markets into discrete groups to be treated differently’.

A segmentation approach can be usefully employed in a number of settings. These include:

• analysing an audience as the basis for gaining enhanced understanding of it
  
  
• to inform plans for future marketing campaigns and activities
  
  
• as a basis for coding the records kept relating to an individual
  
  
• as a means of structuring and devising research instruments and exercises.