Abstract: The present Master thesis broaches the issue of market segmentation and its importance for the Industry and Transportation department of 3M Česko. Market segmentation has been recognized to be a very important tool for strategic marketing planning but currently, its implementation at 3M in the Czech Republic is in an early stage and therefore rather unorganized and not yet framed by precise guidelines. The hypothesis is that linking together need-based and descriptive customer behavior characteristics would lead to more effective market segmentation within the 3M Industry and Transportation department. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to first of all test if the hypothesis is right and if so develop a segmentation method that combines descriptive as well as need-based segmentation criteria. It is to be shown that such an approach could improve segmentation efforts at 3M Česko and lead to more reliable results. The question that arises is whether 3M has understood the benefits market segmentation can bring for the company. And what has to be done in order to improve clustering of customers and to increase 3M's sales volume? Can segmentation take place on one level or is a multi-layer approach the better option? The present study tries to answer these questions by comparing theoretical findings from an extensive literature review with results obtained from semistructured interviews with 3M sales and marketing managers. Above all, one of the main points for improvement in the future is the collection of more market data and the combination of primary data with secondary information already available. The interviews have shown that even though managers are aware of the difficulty to understand 3M's complex and broad market, the feeling predominates that not enough effort is put into gathering additional information. Furthermore, it is recommended to perform descriptive segmentation through the usage of industry coding on a division-wide level, whereas need-based segmentation will be subject of each division individually. Moreover, keeping track of customer data in a standardized database is the key to success. The given recommendations are divided into actions that can be undertaken in the short, medium and long run in order to reach a department-wide effective and efficient use of the multi-layer segmentation in an organized and timely manner.

This thesis comprises, firstly, a careful and detailed description of the institutional workings of the Chinese stock market; secondly, a literature review of the Chinese segmented markets and dual-listed shares price premium; and thirdly, three evidence-based contributions designed to cast new light on the Chinese A-shares premium puzzle. Publicly-listed firms in China, under certain criteria, can issue two different types of shares, namely A-shares and B-shares, to local and foreign investors respectively. These shares carry the same rights and obligations, but are however priced differently due to market segmentation. After a review of the literature on determinants of the premium, the first contribution offers a complementary explanation. I propose that the premium reflects the difference in valuation preferences between the local and foreign investors, i.e., local investors pay more attention to stock liquidity, while foreign investors pay more attention to firm’s intrinsic value, and so firms having more favorable fundamentals tend to have lower premia. The second contribution involves the examination of a controversial question that which investor group is better informed about local assets, by testing the direction of information flows between the A- and B-shares markets. Both time series methods, and panel data techniques which are used for the first time in this context, are employed, in order to get a distinct and more insightful picture against the current literature. The third contribution compares and contrasts institutional settings of China, Singapore and Thailand which have similar market segmentation and dual-listing systems; examines whether or not the premia in the three countries are caused by same factors; and tries to answer why foreign investors in China pay less, rather than more, as commonly observed in other segmented markets, for identical assets. It provides the first cross-country comparison evidence after 1999 with updated data.

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Esta pesquisa é resultado do reconhecimento, no mercado hoteleiro, de algumas vantagens em se conhecer o conjunto de necessidades específicas de um determinado tipo de hóspede. O turismo de negócios é visto como um importante segmento do mercado turístico e como forte gerador da demanda hoteleira em algumas regiões. A proposta é, a partir da apresentação de características do mercado turístico e do setor hoteleiro, discutir a percepção do turista de negócios quanto aos atributos oferecidos pelos hotéis que justificam a preferência por dado empreendimento para sua estadia. A pesquisa bibliográfica, aliada a um estudo exploratório na cidade de São Paulo, permite algumas conjecturas a respeito do comportamento do turista de negócios no que diz respeito à hospedagem. Em virtude do dinamismo desta demanda, espera-se incentivar com esta pesquisa a continuidade, por profissionais e acadêmicos, dos estudos a respeito do mercado hoteleiro para o turismo de negócios. / business tourist behavior concerning hosting. Due to the dynamism of hotel demand, is expected that professionals and academics be stimulated to prospect and study the hotel market for business tourism. This research is the outcome of the recognition, in the hotel market, of the advantages of knowing the needs of a certain guest profile. Business tourism is an important segment of the tourism market and generates a great demand in some specific regions. The purpose of the research is, from the overview of the characteristics of tourism market and hotels segment, discuss the business tourist perspective of the attributes offered by hotels that justify their preference for a specific project. Research bibliography combined with an exploration in the city of São Paulo, allowed some hypothesis regarding

In the past times, luxury had been a way for the noble to show their wealth and social status off, which belongs to behaviors of the minority. However, with the times and the cultures changing, people¡¦s viewpoints toward luxury have altered. Trading up has been a prevailing phenomenon while new luxury also has come out gradually. As long as consumers regard the products as worth through the affective facet, they will be willing to make purchases with higher prices. Though luxury has nothing with the social status anymore, the value presented by luxury has overpassed what the currency can provide. This study tried to explore consumers¡¦ attitudes toward luxury through cognitive component, affective component, and behavioral component, further, to do the segmentation of consumers based on their attitudes toward luxury. In addition, this study explored whether diverse demographic segmentation will lead to varied attitudes toward luxury, and even analyzed the relation between attitudes toward luxury and buying behaviors. This study took convenience sampling. The questionnaires comprised the paper ones and the online ones, distributed on March 11th, 2007 and completed on April 6th, 2007, while there were 518 questionnaires of validity. The study result found that the attitudes toward luxury can be divided into three categories. One was the self-presenting, another was the pro-luxury, and the other was the anti-luxury. This study found that those who have positive attitudes toward luxury will purchase luxurious products more often. Besides, age and education would have a remarkable effect on attitudes toward luxury; by contrast, gender, occupation, income, and residence failed to. Finally, this study recommended that the corporations should choose marketing strategies according to consumers¡¦ attitudes toward luxury. As for those who had negative attitudes toward luxury, the companies should avoid using ¡§luxury¡¨ to be the main point for the advertisements. The corporations had to reinforce the intrinsic value within luxurious products and the added value, and further took care of the traditional elite luxury market and the mass luxury market.

Due to the development of Information Technology and World Wide Web, now sales can understand more about customer's browsing behaviors through the World Wide Web. Compared with now, sales could only get the sale data in the past. There is a huge grown of these data availability compared with the past. As the advance of computer hardware, we have more ability to store these data. However, with these data of buyers' making decision process not being analyzed, decision makers often could not understand the hidden information effectively. The 3C retail chain stores had been selected as a case study for this research. We thought that consumer's need and acceptance toward products had already been reflected in the past consuming choices and searching behavior records. If we can find out the correlation between the searching behaviors and actual consuming records, this will assist business obtain the most appropriate marketing information on the web and increase response effectively. This will be tremendously profitable for marketing decision making. Using above theory, we suggest that data integration analysis model among members is applied to distinguish the marking segmentation for website promotion of company A. We hope that the model will improve current marketing communication and provide the practice value. In the past, we normally apply demographic statistics, geographical distribution or social economy to segment consumers for the research about divining target customers. However, there has been no appropriate segmentation model to assist business of actual brick-and-click to segmentation on the basic behavior of the customer purchase for internet marketing promotions yet. The consumer's behaviors had been applied as segmentation and the buyer's usage and response toward website had been utilized as foundation for this research. Principal components analysis had been applied to extract behavior variable; then Two-Stage Classification Method had applied to divide members into different groups. We divide members into life style groups of the one with similar data points and the one with different data points by the exploratory segmentation model for this research. This will be a nature formation of market segmentation to assist business to pin point what products to be sold on the web and how to differentiate the products. As well as assist business to segment member effectively, distinguish area website service and usage limitation. Business will no longer shoot blind for marketing to members and will be able to make the proper e-marketing communication decision.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 80-86). Also available in electronic version. Access restricted to campus users.

Thesis (M.B.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1984.

Thesis (M.B.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1983.