Marketing Segmentation of the Department Store Industry in Taiwan _A Survey for Taichung City

In recent years, with the rapid economic development in Taiwan, the industry of department store has become very prosperous and this also accelerated the change of customer requirements. Under such circumstance, the competition between department stores became more and more intense and forced companies to attract consumers through a variety of marketing strategies to gain competitive advantage. This paper focus on the marketing segmentation of consumer group of department stores at Taichung city. The data are collected from the consumers of Shin Kong Mitsukoshi department store and Chung Yu department store. The questionnaire is formed by expert interviews which includes the part of lifestyle, buying behavior, satisfaction and population statistics and a total of 432 valid questionnaires are collected. According to the result, there are four factors can be used to distinguish the lifestyle of consumers of department stores and by applying the cluster analysis, the consumers can be separated as three groups crossing geographical segmentation: Distinction Explorers, Enjoyment Consumers and Economic Hunters. This study also explored whether different characteristics of consumers cause significant differences among these three groups. Â