Using Market Segmentation Approaches to Understand the Green Consumer

Although there has been considerable academic work focusing on discovering and characterizing the Green Consumer - or more correctly, those espousing “Green�? attitudes - there is considerably less academic interest in understanding the segment characteristics of consumers with varying degrees and types of environmental concern. This can be contrasted with work in the commercial sector where firms and organizations are concerned less with general proclivities toward environmental awareness and more interested in the degree to which such concern aligns with the needs of the organization or the cause. In other words, commercial organizations are more concerned with the specific demand for their products and services and NGOs with the degree of interest in their specific cause than either are with characterizations of the market in total. This chapter concentrates on how we can apply models of market segmentation to the understanding of the Green Consumer. As academic work in this specific subfield is limited and the commercial work either of varied quality, purposely biased, or targeted at a very specific organizational need, what follows is more of a primer on thinking rather than a summary of a well established literature.