UnReDeregulated

Segmentation is a fundamental basis of developing understanding about customers and gaining insights in their motivations and interests. The quest for knowledge in all intelligent beings actually is about developing an approach to find an underlying basis of segregating objects and studying their characteristics. No knowledge could have been built by studying every object as unique. In fact Segmenting objects is instinctive for any curious mind. I would like to restrict this article to practical considerations involved in multivariate statistical methods for clustering analysis rather than conceptual considerations faced by marketing researchers. 1. To Standardize or Not: I have come across many researchers on either extreme of always standardizing all independent variables or always keeping all of them unstandardized. Either way this thumb rule is not a wise strategy. Changing scales through standardization affects the distances between cases and reduces the variabi...