Working Within Resource Constraints: A Qualitative Segmentation Study

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.