Classification of the herbal medicine market from the perspective of customer health and appropriate strategies

One of the major industries to meet the goals of development is the industry of herbal medicines. As the scholars of the field argue, the share of the herbal medicine market in Iran is less than four percent. This might be due to the executive negligence of targeted marketing. The present research was conducted through interviews and questionnaires. The participants in the study includes all the people going to pharmacies to purchase herbal medicines. The sample size was determined to be 460. Purposeful and classified sampling methods were used in qualitative and quantitative sections respectively. The qualitative phase was based on the grounded theory, while k-means and neural network algorithms were used for quantitative analysis. The qualitative findings point to nine essential categories. Based on DB، RS and RMSSTD indexes, a neural network proved to have a higher accuracy than K- Means. Therefore, the findings were presented based on it. As the results suggest, the best mode is the classification of this market (i.e., herbal medicine) into five segments. The results can contribute to the presentation of an appropriate strategy for each segment in order to simultaneously create values for both customers and market, in particular, and create facilities for the expansion of herbal medicine industry, in general.