Lifestyle study stands at the border between lots of traditional academic areas, developing experience from sociology and the social sciences in regions as different as business, retailing, marketing, understanding of customers, and health and social care. The very diversity of subjects and disciplines with an interest in lifestyle research generates complexity in an already lively and fast-changing subject of research. Multifaceted approaches are used, alongside an assortment of academic and business conventions, but typically, lifestyle research focuses on subgroups within the overall population defined by age, occupation, religion, sexuality, health conditions, or behaviors. Concerning business study, this market segmentation of the consumer marketplace is an integral usage for lifestyle research.

As the value of the customer in determining the success of business operations has become increasingly evident to businesses, so the significance of lifestyle-based market segmentation has improved and the value of ongoing cultural change was recognized. Ongoing cultural and social change, both in buying dynamics, in associated group behavior, and in lifestyle decision making are illuminated by lifestyle research but also act as a key source of information for strategic planning within business and for the continuing development of the successful corporate strategy. The connections between lifestyle research and the development of successful marketing strategies are currently being discussed within the academic literature, both from a management standpoint and from a social science perspective.

The development of a growing understanding of the varied research that contributes to the field of study is vital to the continuing development of strategic and successful business development. Usually, research in this area is grounded first in the notion of lifestyle and relates this to different elements of a person or group lifestyle. Key themes that may influence lifestyle include activities/behavior, values, and attitudes, individuals versus groups, group interaction, coherence, recognizability, and decision. In this definition, lifestyle research may focus either on the consequences of belonging to a specific group or upon the consequences of particular lifestyles, including areas like the role of lifestyle in the management of clinical conditions or the effect of a voluntarily adopted lifestyle on different areas of someone’s life.

In business conditions, lifestyle research can be used both to classify customers concerning patterns of behavior, buying, etc. and as a means of studying lifestyle as a key element in the creation of new goods, services, etc.. 1 important distinction lies between research that tries to determine causal relationships between a lifestyle and the growth of particular patterns of health and behavior and an alternate pattern of lifestyle research that assesses the effect of lifestyle changes. Both have significant implications for business, being directly connected to the development and marketing of products and services. The lifestyles analyzed may be proscriptive-and a lot of the research in this area lies in health-or wider changes that reflect the growth of society, the economy, and the workplace.

Business research generally focuses on this latter situation, where the intertwining of the cause, effect, and incremental change offers fruitful ground for study. One useful example of this intertwining is the association between the availability of processed ready-meals and the lack of availability of time for cooking. Does a lack of time activate the requirement for ready-meals? Or does the access to ready-meals facilitate wider changes in lifestyle that tend to mitigate against the”ring-fencing” of time to devote to cooking? The answer to these questions is not likely to be simple-and in this case the continuing development of skills within the customer group would play a contributing role-but this example.

Lifestyle retailing is another important field of research, where the marketing of a”lifestyle package” connected to a brand, a group of products, or a service forms part of the marketing strategy for many businesses. The creation of aspirational brands within a customer economy-be their products or services is a key driver for many businesses. Normally, however, this builds upon first market-segmentation work, and productive lifestyle retailing strategies tend to indicate that a very well-researched and clearly recognized market-segmentation strategy.

Building upon this, so-called subcultures of ingestion have been a focal point for some extra study focusing on ideas and theoretical frameworks from overall consumption literature and implementing these in an assortment of servicescapes. A more recent approach to segmentation, as an instance, has included Web-based-related lifestyle research, where accessibility, excitement, and propensity to utilize internet resources formed a key defining part of a person or group lifestyle and therefore the basis for current research.