Correspondence: B. Zafer Erdogan, Bilecik School of Economics and Business Administration, Dumlupinar Universitesi, Bilecik 11010, Turkey. Tel: +90 228 212 4025; Fax: +90 228 212 9140; e-mail: bzerdogan@yahoo.co.uk

¹is an associate professor of Marketing, Dumlupinar University, Turkey. His research interests includes controversial advertising, advertising complaining behaviour, social marketing, celebrity endorsement and research methods.

²is an assistant professor of Marketing at the University of Lethbridge, Canada. He has been involved in a variety of social marketing research projects, including promotion of hand hygiene among healthcare workers.

³is a senior lecturer in the Department of Marketing, University of Strathclyde, Scotland. He is particularly interested in using multivariate statistical tools for interpretation and model-building. He is presently doing research in internationalization, gift buying and small firms.

Received 5 December 2006; Revised 5 December 2006.

Abstract

The importance of media selection based on media consumption habits has increased over the past two decades, with rising media placement costs coupled with expanding media options leading to fragmented target segments. Media planners spend valuable resources to understand their consumers' relationships with media, but such information is hard to come by for special audiences. This article characterises medical journal readership of 457 general practitioners (GPs) who responded to a mail survey. GPs were clustered on their medical journal readership patterns. Results indicate that there are four distinct groups of medical journal readership, a finding that is of interest to marketing managers in the healthcare industry.