A customer segmentation sequence for B2B markets based on levels of market orientation of firms

Customer segmentation in industrial markets has gained more and more attention over the last years. There are many different criteria to segment a company’s market, most of them being organizational, buyer and financial characteristics. With already existing models in literature, a sequence of effective criteria for customer segmentation has not been established in relation to market orientation. The higher a company’s market orientation, the more complex the segmentation should be. Therefore, interviews and surveys with companies in the engineering sector were conducted, evaluated and then concluded in a new sequence of a segmentation method. How this segmentation then influences customer treatment is explained in this thesis below as well as striking outcomes of the analysis.