Is geographic segmentation suitable for marketing studies? An investigation applied to Brazil

Abstract

Purpose: This paper investigates if geographic market segmentation is sufficient to overarch cultural specificities of each Federal Unit (FU) of Brazil.Method: The Brazilian FUs were clustered, considering the human values and the social axioms, in order to verify their similarity to the five official geopolitical regions’ structure of Brazil. It consisted in an online survey (N=1,385), using a non-probabilistic snowball sampling within the FUs. The analysis involved non-metric multidimensional scaling (MDS), with the dimensions of human values and social axioms by FU (N=27).
Main results: The results are highly valuable and allow researchers and managers to confirm that regionalized marketing strategies are not adequate and might lead to wrong marketing strategies, considering the cultural differences among Brazilian FUs. By examining the MDS results, it becomes clear that Brazil’s cultural similarities among FUs are not consistent to geographic regions’ segmentation.  
Relevance/Originality: The comparison of two market segmentation types: geographical and cultural. This comparison showed the Brazilian FUs clustered differently when considering cultural aspects in comparison to geographical divisions. Therefore, the present research becomes relevant in the Brazilian segmentation studies by empirically showing that cultural and geographical segmentation must be considered separately when developing marketing strategies.
Theoretical/Methodological contributions: Theoretical contributions involve advances in cultural mapping in the individual level, and empirical contribution about the effectiveness of cultural constructs as consumers’ differentiation device.