Abstract

The consumers belong to various segmentation markets simultaneously, not to a certainly segmentation market, because the consumers often use products of many different brands to meet their different needs. The purpose of this study is to develop the fuzzy clustering method to do the soft segmentation and to improve the weakness of the hard segmentation. The soft segmentation makes the data process more reasonable and easier to explain. In this study, we use the credit card owners in Taipei City and Kaohsiung City to do the case study. The benefit variables are used to do the fuzzy market segmentations. According to the membership grade viewpoint, we also analyze the characteristics of the consumer's behavior of different segmentation markets.
From the study, we get eight benefit variables and four major market segmentations. And we use the membership grade concept to calculate the market magnitude. The crisp partition and soft partition analysis can reflect the market dynamic feature. From the case study, it is shown that what the consumers care most is the usage safety of the credit card. The consumers have little loyalties to the product of a certain brand. Besides, we also find there is difference between the purchase behavior of Taipei consumers and that of the Kaohsiung consumers.