Building a Customer Psychographic Profile
Here’s a test: When I say “psychographics,” don’t think of Anthony Perkins. Ahh, I always fail, too.
Psychographics, like demographics, can help you research your customers. But where demographic research looks at recognizable and quantifiable characteristics of people (like age, sex, or educational attainment), psychographics are focused on psychological or sociological characteristics. So demographics can show you the median income of people in a particular place, and psychographics can hint at how they feel about spending that income. Psychographic research can also tell you how the things consumers buy fit into an overall consumer lifestyle.
We generally beat demographic data into the ground here on the blog (and must drive a good portion of the total traffic to the American FactFinder, if only out of sheer repetitiveness), so today we’ll just focus on resources to find psychographic information.
If you’d like to create a more focused marketing or business plan by learning more about potential customers’ buying patterns, consumer preferences, personal interests, and lifestyles, read on.
Psychographic Profiles by Location
The Claritas You Are Where You Live tool provides free psychographic profiles by zip code. Click the “You Are Where You Live” button in the right-hand column to run a search.
The site will provide a map of your zip code along with an alphabetical listing of the top five psychographic segments in that area. These jauntily-titled segments attempt to group consumers with similar values, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles together. Clicking on any of these segment titles will provide a description of that segment, including lifestyle traits, age ranges, income levels, and the number of total U.S. households included in that segment.
Use this site to flush out demographic research on a particular place, and to learn more about the interests and lifestyles of people in a specific location, especially if you plan to market or advertise directly to those folks.
Psychographic Profiles by Product Type
You can find psychographic information on consumers of particular types of products using NAA Consumer Segmentation Snapshots. Provided by the Newspaper Association of America, these profiles are organized by broad industry heading (from automotive to food, finance to technology, and health to vacation) and give short descriptions of different types of consumers under those headings. Each of these descriptions offers a segment overview, a male/female ratio, an age/income profile, and a consumer preference listing (which shows other items these consumers are most likely to have purchased recently).
So if you’re a car dealer, and are trying to reach out to luxury car buyers, you can use the “Automotive – Luxury and Style” segment snapshot to find some basic demographic characteristics of folks interested in big-dollar cars as well as learn more about their other consumer activities. You might use this when deciding where and how to market and advertise to these consumers, or for forging cross-industry promotional partnerships.
Why Use Psychographic Data? And How?
For more on why and how to use psychographic data, an excellent – and brief – research tip from the Market Truths research firm provides good guidance:
- "Psychographics are …useful for providing the insights necessary to craft advertising that focuses not on product attributes, but rather on the benefits that those attributes may provide to the buyer."
- "it’s often useful to first identify the psychographic characteristics of the target market(s), and then to determine the relative prevalence of the characteristics among different demographic groups."
So, you can use psychographics to align advertising with consumer values, and tie those values to people in a particular place with demographic research.
But psychographics won’t tell you anything about Anthony Perkins.
p.s. Oh, and if you’re a HillSearch or BizToolkit Pro member, you’ve got access to another psychographic research source, the New Strategist Demographic e-Books. This series of e-books provides all sorts of psychographic information on particular groups of consumers. HillSearch members will find a link to this collection on the Custom Search page, BizToolkit members can find it by selecting Market Research from the “I Want to Find” drop-down menu.
Hitchcock WILL haunt you for that Perkins joke.
I wish I could say it was worth it.
This is good information on how to break down psychograpics by zip code. Everyone always talk about psychograpics, but no one explains where to start.
