Art Market

What variables would you use to segment the art market? What groups or segments would you identify? What are the behaviors of each group?

There are two general categories of variables to segment the consumer markets : customer characteristics and buying responses.

In terms of customer characteristics, we could consider demographic and geographic characteristics. For geographic characteristics, we could use city size or location (eg: national, regional, urban and international) as a variable. For demographic characteristics, we could use gender, age, marital status, ethnic groups and income as variables.

In terms of buying responses, we could consider benefits sought, ways of purchase and usage. For benefits sought, we could use different types of artworks as a variable. For example, there are contemporary and modern artworks by older and younger artists, photography prints, original paintings in different mediums such as oil, acrylic etc. and also sculptures and digital art collectibles. Different buying motives could also be considered. For example, people may buy artworks for passion, or for investment purpose or impulsive buying or gift giving. For ways of purchase, we could choose from buying during auctions or online shops. As for usage, we could segment the art market by keeping track of customers’ frequency of buying artworks i.e. usage rate.

Market segmentation is the science of dividing an overall market into key customer subsets, or segments, whose members share similar characteristics and needs. Because it involves significant market research, market segmentation can be costly. But it is particularly important for small businesses, which often lack the resources to target large aggregate markets or to maintain a wide range of differentiated products for varied markets. Market segmentation allows a small business to develop a product and a marketing