International Market Segmentation as Practice

With the globalization of markets and unprecedented levels of global migration, international managers face significant customer heterogeneity in foreign countries. International marketing scholarship about the development of international customer strategies has focused on the use of demographic or country level variables to construct segmentation models. Some scholars have identified a gap in the literature between the conceptualization of international market segmentation and the practice of it. This research aims to fill this gap and to extend theories about international market segmentation to better explain how international managers address customer heterogeneity in foreign countries. The author takes a strategy-as-practice approach, which requires an ethnographic study of managers—including in-depth interviews, observations, and archival analysis—as they strategize about customers in a foreign country. The context is international financial services firms where managers are serving diverse customer segments in the United States.