Fashion Marketing: Contemporary Issues, Second edition - Pr School

76 Fashion Marketing
fragmented and consumers in the process were less predictable (Firat and
Venkatesh, 1993; Brown, 1995; Firat and Shultz, 1997). Global changes in lifestyle,
income, ethnic group and age continue to broaden the diversity of customer
needs and buying behaviours (Sheth et al., 2000) and some observers
suggest that market segmentation approaches are becoming less effective and
efficient as a result (Firat and Schultz, 1997; Sheth et al., 1999). This is particularly
evident in fashion markets where the benefits derived from products and
brands are inherently varied and dynamic. Consequently, simple segmentation
frameworks adopting measures of social class, chronological age and gender
are widely acknowledged as less useful descriptors of consumer attitudes,
tastes and behaviours than they were even 10 years previously. Evidence from
marketing practice supports this view.
‘The area of demographics, you know, the A, B, C1 . . . that area of
segmentation, is not as important anymore, particularly with fashion.
You can’t look at it in the same way that you used too, especially as
people mix things up a lot now.’
(Marketing Manager: Supermarket Fashion Retailer)
The industry response to this problem has seen an increased popularity of segmentation
approaches based on behavioural characteristics and increasingly
complex segmentation frameworks (e.g. The Experian Consultancy’s ‘Fashion
Segments,’ 2004). However, in the dynamic context of fashion, problems with
this approach remain and it is therefore important for us to closely examine
the underpinning foundations of contemporary segmentation debates before
offering an alternative and potentially fruitful alternative perspective.
Market segmentation: the evidence
Whilst critics have long argued that there are many managerial and practical
problems to be encountered when considering how to segment markets and
target consumers it is helpful to deconstruct the basis of such claims. The central
concern behind several criticisms of the managerial approach to market
segmentation focuses upon the notion that the process delivers outcomes that
are neither robust nor stable. Clearly this would certainly appear to be the case
in a dynamic market context such as fashion retailing. However, any manager
implementing a segmentation strategy makes two undeniable assumptions
concerning the nature of social world we make sense of: first, that the customer
can be recognized through time as a major source of variability, and also
that customers can be consistently aggregated in ways which can be correlated
to other descriptor variables (Wensley, 1995). An objective understanding of
the managerial segmentation approach might therefore overlook the acknowledgement
that ‘every [segmentation] model is at best an approximation of
reality’ (Wedel and Kamakura, 2002, p. 329). Clearly, therefore, one can argue
that a major area for concern here lies in the ontological development of the