A Growing Self-Organizing Neural Network for Lifestyle Segmentation

Lifestyles can be used to explain existent and to anticipate future consumer behavior, both in a geographical and a temporal context. Basing market segmentations on consumer lifestyles enables the development of purposeful advertising strategies and the design of new products meeting future demands. The present paper introduces a new growing self-organizing neural network which identifies lifestyles, or rather consumer types, in survey data largely autonomously. Before applying the algorithm to real marketing data we are going to demonstrate its general performance and adaptability by means of synthetic 2D data featuring distinct heterogeneity with respect to the arrangement of the individual data points.