Smith's idea of segmentation has been steadily refined
into Kotler's target marketing, and widely adopted by
academics and practitioners. However, this approach has
not been empirically justified, and is logically invalid
in its simple forms. In this paper, a logically valid
approach to target marketing is developed, and the
conditions required for such an approach established.
These conditions are found to be true far less often
than suggested by proponents of target marketing. An
alternative approach is then offered to guide marketing
decisions when the requirements for target marketing
cannot be met. pdf 1994
