We could reduce the number of outliers by making the segments more inclusive, but that also make them more heterogenous. It is often very useful. But it is only one way of understanding consumer heterogeneity. They are found in the dead center, statistically speaking, of each cluster. All others are considered to be mixtures of these pure types.
Archetypal imagery is common in everyday language.
There's only one . . . The Real McCoy It is not their extremeness that makes certain consumers archtypical. Rather, it is the fact that a given set of archetypes in a survey optimally explain the variation among other other respondents. As explained below, archetypes are identified through objective statistical procedures. Yet in our experience, archtypical consumers are more intuitive, more familiar than the types of consumers which seem to represent traditional cluster-based segments.