Customer Segmentation - Data Mining Techniques in CRM: Inside Customer Segmentation - page 224

the customer base and gain customer insight that will enable the design and
development of differentiated marketing strategies.
Clustering is a way to identify segments not known in advance and split
customers into groups that are not previously defined. The identification of
the segments should be followed by profiling the revealed customer groupings.
Profiling is necessary for understanding and labeling the segments based on the
common characteristics of the members.
The criteria used to divide customers (behavioral, demographic, value or
loyalty information, needs/attitudinal data) define the segmentation type. In this
chapter we briefly introduced some of the most widely used segmentation types
before concentrating on behavioral and value-based segmentations which con-
stitute the main topic of the topic. For these types we proposed a detailed
methodological framework and suggested ways for the use of their results in mar-
keting. The following chapters feature a set of detailed case studies which show
the use of the proposed methodology in real-world behavioral and value-based
segmentation applications for various major industries.