SEGMENTING CONSUMER MARKETS IN THE U.S. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES BY THE USE OF POLITICS AND IDEOLOGY

American business enterprise is increasingly seeking export markets for products as a means of expansion, and in some instances to offset loss in domestic business due to declining markets or international competitors. This paper deals with market segmentation and its role in the successful positioning of products in foreign markets. More specifically, the focus here is how consumer political identifications and ideological values can be used as a basis for effectively segmenting markets. To U.S. firms, the potential benefit of gaining this insight is twofold. First, firms may thus have at their disposal a segmentation tool as yet unrecognized by competitors. Second, politics and political ideology have constructs which appear to be common to most election‐based governmental forms; thus the segmentation applications explored here would be transferable to foreign markets, whereas many other more conventional means of segmentation transfer poorly from the U.S. to other countries.