Current practices, challenges, and opportunities for lifestyle-based market segmentation of older consumers in Thailand

Abstract

Older consumers’ consumption patterns differ from those of other customer groups, affecting many business factors and practices, including product development and service delivery. Acquiring, monitoring, and processing lifestyle and other behavior-oriented data become key activities to gain insights about older consumers. While lifestyle patterns have been observed in marketing research for several decades, observing older consumers’ lifestyles is still a challenging task and needs further exploration. This study investigates the current practices of marketing researchers and professionals in Thailand in conducting lifestyle-based market segmentation (LMS) as well as related challenges and opportunities. A qualitative in-depth interview approach was employed, with eighteen marketers who have at least ten years of experience. The verbatim data were analyzed by using deductive thematic analysis. As a result, Thai marketers frequently use self-reported questionnaires in offline and online formats, face-to-face interviews with older consumers, telephone surveys, and questionnaires posted on social media sites to collect data for LMS. From the marketers’ perspectives, the LMS of older consumers requires abundant resources. It is still perplexing to access data that directly lead to customer insights into the current practices. Additionally, there is a lack of data collection tools tailored to LMS for the older population. Nevertheless, these issues shed some light on specific opportunities to develop more robust and tailored tools and techniques to conduct LMS faster and more efficiently (i.e., getting valid and reliable data while using fewer resources than the current ones).