Market Segmentation via Consumer Human Behavior Analysis: The utilization of behavioral profiling instruments to target specific consumer Market Segments

The trend in marketing today is the building of relationships with the customer. However before relationship-building can occur, the marketer must understand that diverse people purchase different products for different needs. Much research has been published on personality type directing human behavior. These days, many firms utilize behavioral profiling instruments such as the MBTI in their employee-assessment processes, in order to assign desired personality "types" to specific assignments. In the same way, the detection of consumer personality types can target products for specific, perceived needs. Behavioral instruments such as the MBTI, while offering significant insight into individual personality types, are often quite lengthy (e.g., 126 questions) and hence are not expedient for realistic consumer participation. If an abbreviated testing instrument could be developed, with Jungian typological roots, and could be validated to be statistically analogous to the MBTI instrument, then this abbreviated, "new" instrument would be of significant value to marketers, who would then be able to ascertain consumer buying behavior with higher degrees of accuracy.