Segmentation of Hedonic Consumption: An Application of Latent Class Analysis to Consumer Transaction Databases

While the broad and growing sector of leisure, culture and entertainment is rapidly adapting to marketing, little is known about segmentation in this field. The sector has customer and transaction databases of very good quality, but usage-based segmentation in this new field poses new problems, as hedonic consumption goods are importantly different from other consumption goods. The type of consumer choice behavior suggested in the literature demands a segmentation of category purchase incidence identified transaction data based on Latent Class Analysis. We illustrate such an approach to a library transaction database. The article concludes with a reflection on the results and suggests further directions for research.