Pacific Brands: Segmenting Australian Brassiere Consumers

Lukas Wels

Marketing Engineering, Summer Term 2016

Matriculation No.: 5502551

Pacific Brands: Segmenting Australian Brassiere Consumers

Pacific Brands Limited (PBG), the leader in women’s intimates in the Australian

market, currently experiences a downturn due to the overall economic situation: consumers

seem to be trading down in their product choices and spend less on brassieres than they have

before. Furthermore, new competition, more precisely small retailers and online sellers,

emerges and stationary retailers start decreasing shelf space as well as sales efforts for premium

brands. Although the Berlei brand, with its Infinity and Timeless products, performed

comparatively strong lately, PBG CEO Sue Morphet is concerned with its future earning

potential. Therefore, she approached us with the task to identify and define specific customer

segments within the brassiere market. In a second step, she expects us to come up with effective

advertising and promotional activities which help promoting the two product lines and

simultaneously increase sales.

Task 1: Identifying the key segments of brassiere shoppers

In order to figure out the key segments of brassiere shoppers for PBG and identify their

individual physical, psychological and retail-experience needs, we used a segmentation and

classification analysis. The underlying principle of segmenting the market is to concentrate

marketing efforts on specific customer groups, with their distinct desires, wants and needs, that

companies can serve best. As each customer group requires a different marketing mix,

companies cannot appeal to all of them and therefore need to focus on a limited number (Lamb,

2003).

Our analysis builds upon a market research study which was conducted to collect data

on segmentation and descriptor variables of 221 consumers. In a first step, we ran the

segmentation analysis with the relatively large number of nine segments (hierarchical approach,

Ward’s method)...