Psychographics Marketing Defined

How To Use Psychographics to Tailor Your Marketing Message

Psychographics is the study and classification of people based on psychological measures including:

  • Attitudes
  • Habits
  • Values
  • Interests
  • Opinions
Studying psychographics bring richness to basic demographic data analysis – allowing us to understand what people think, or why they behave in certain ways.

Examples of Psychographics

Many studies include psychographics in the form of attitudinal statements to which people can express their level of agreement or disagreement. For example, we can present statements on any number of topics to our audience via surveys such as:
“Quality is always worth the price”
“I only eat food made from natural ingredients”
“I always make the effort to look my best”
Analyzing the responses to these types of statements allow us to gauge levels of agreement/disagreement with each.

Why Analyze Psychographics?

Attitudes affect our behavior so understanding attitudes brings us one step closer to being able to predict behavior (such as propensity to purchase an item). It also can help us to use the right marketing messages.

In my previous blog post called “What is Demographics”, I defined demographics and how they help us target our messages to the appropriate demographic groups, but psychographics help us tailor the marketing message itself.
We all know that a marketing message can be much more persuasive if it is seen as relevant, or when it strikes a chord with our target audience. Think of a breakfast cereal, as an example. We could talk about our brand of cereal as being an economical choice, or we could talk about our cereal as providing a natural alternative to other cereals…two very different messages. What do current users of our brand of cereal feel, relative to users of other brands?
If our strategy is to maintain our loyal customer base, we’d want to ensure we knew what type of people currently use our brand, to ensure our messaging is consistent with their beliefs. That’s where psychographics come in. By using psychographic measurements, we can determine whether our customer base is interested in maintaining a healthy lifestyle at any cost, versus interested in getting the best value for their dollar. We would certainly communicate the marketing attributes of our brand of breakfast cereal quite differently, depending on which group we’re addressing.
Or what if we are publishers of a website, and we want to ensure the content we have on our site is relevant to the audience? Simply ask the audience a few psychographic questions to better understand their attitudes, habits, or opinions. Then, we can provide more targeted marketing that have a better chance of resonating with our audience.
Psychographics translate to rich and valuable information, providing insights that help us make better marketing decisions.
Asking the right psychographic and demographic questions is key to getting these insights. Our market research team has created some of the industries best and most cost-effective online market research tools that allow publishers, brands, blogs and other online businesses understand their audience’s demographics, psychographic and other behaviors and attitudes.
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