Aviary Segmentation: Theory and Method

The proliferation of social media has spawned new lifestyles that guide consumer behavior. Understanding the connection between lifestyles and consumer behavior has become much more important in a world with social media because businesses can more easily provide the right information to the right people, as well as identify who the right people are to buy their products. Business can engage in mass personalization, by means of, for example, sending a birthday greeting to every customer on the right day. Most importantly, social media provide opportunities for aggressive interaction with customers in lifestyle groups, for purposes ranging from detecting complaints to brand extensions to product co-creation. The social media group members have self-selected into a category that embraces a cluster of motives. Because of these aggregations, the importance of understanding lifestyle is today infinitely more valuable and more important for effective marketing than it was in previous generations. This session presents an empirical lifestyle segmentation approach about consumer use of information, and it develops themes regarding the strategic implications of this segmentation system for marketing managers. This session emphasizes finding the right customer over treating every customer as right. The first paper describes the theory and method that guided this research. The second paper discusses sources of health information as a function of aviary lifestyles and product/service category. The final paper describes research focused on the antecedents and mediating factors of purchase decisions. Lifestyle influences an individual’s attitude towards media, which leads to differences in consumer behavior. It examines four types of media influences: Olympic programs, sports sponsorship, public relationship and direct marketing. Olympic programs references an individual’s receptiveness to Olympic sponsors and as well as commercials shown during the Olympic Games. Sports sponsorships are similar, although they stress receptiveness to sponsors at events the individual attends. The public relationship variable assesses the impact of product information portrayal in the news. Finally, direct marketing examines responsiveness to direct marketing advertisements and information.