Explore the Fundamentals of Psychographic Segmentation

Psychographic segmentation is a marketing strategy that involves dividing consumers into different groups based on their personality traits, values, interests, lifestyles, and attitudes. By using psychographic segmentation, businesses can create personalised marketing messages that resonate with their target audience, leading to increased engagement and conversions.

Knowing just the demographic is insufficient for marketers to win customers in this age of constant online connectivity. Many touchpoints in the buyers’ journey are becoming complex to uncover and harder to ignore. One of the most effective tactics for customer segmentation today is using the psychographic data of the customer. With psychographic segmentation, marketers can identify what customers actually value, which behavioural and geographical data cannot provide.  

What is Psychographic Segmentation All About?

Marketers use psychographic segmentation as a consumer research technique to segregate the target audience based on their individual interests. They can be collective beliefs, attitudes, opinions, lifestyles, or similar of smaller groups of individuals sharing the same. In this technique, marketers look up individuals on Facebook groups, communities on Reddit, other internet forums, or physical events like music or film festivals.   

This kind of segmentation allows marketers to understand the customers’ compatibility with the brand and their motivation to purchase or interact. 

For any ideal marketing strategy, psychographics not only helps in personalisation of communication on an individual level but also in adjusting marketing campaigns and developing the best product or service catering to the demands of the audience that has more potential to convert them. 

How Psychographic Segmentation Differs From Behavioural Segmentation

Behavioural segmentation examines how customers interact with the brand and buy its products or services. Psychographic segmentation, on the other hand, focuses on the reasons that guide the audience to buy or pay attention to a brand.  

When it comes to behavioural segmentation, marketers can look at their online behaviours while interacting with a website. For example, an approach to segmenting behaviours would be to look into User Behaviour Data on Google Analytics or similar tools. Important metrics like bounce rate can help you understand how your customers or readers are finding your blogs helpful (if at all). 

Psychographic data can become more complex than behavioural data to mine for. Psycholinguistic dictionaries, one-on-one interviews, market research, demographic and behavioural information – all contribute to psychographic targeting. 

Should Marketers Forget Demographic Data and Only Use Psychographic Information?

Marketers need to use both demographic and psychographic information. Demographic data can inform marketers about the broader picture – age, gender, and income of let’s say, five individuals, based on which the buyer persona remains the same. Psychographic data can provide a deeper analysis of these five individuals and help focus on marketing efforts based on each of their personalities or attitudes. Using psychographics, the same buyer persona based on demographic segmentation would be categorised into maybe, five types of buyer personas. 

Audience-centred marketing frameworks like STP model focus on choosing the ideal market segment for creating a marketing mix for each. Knowing both the demographic and psychographic segments would help create more realistic buyer personas. With more useful information, marketers can fine-tune the product positioning and process of communication.   

Explanation of Psychographic Segmentation Variables with Examples 

The following are five common variables important to psychographic market segmentation. 

Activities, Interests, and Opinions 

Also called AIO, this psychographic variable focuses on what the target audience enjoys on a day-to-day basis. They may prefer watching a specific film genre or playing a specific sport over another. Naturally, this group will respond and most likely convert when marketing campaigns cater to their AIO. 

Netflix and Spotify recommend users movies and music genres based on their AIO. 

Social Status

The needs, wants, and demands of customers vary based on their social class.  A brand’s pricing strategy or product positioning can entirely take social status into consideration, for instance. Many tech brands do this. One obvious example of this type of segmenting is Apple, which promotes its products to a high-income crowd.  

Personality

This is one of the most crucial variables to consider when it comes to segmenting customers based on the communication preferences of different personality types. 

Personality types vary; some common ones are introverted/extroverted, highly opinionated, creative, and emotional. 

The Five Personality Traits in Psychological Study

One personality model psychologists use to study broader personality traits is OCEAN or CANOE. This framework, since 1949, has been reworked on till today. 

O is for Openness, denoting that people are imaginative, creative, and insightful. 

C is for Conscientiousness, which denotes that an individual has more control over impulses.

E stands for Extraversion, which means a person enjoys talking and sharing opinions with others in company. 

A is for Agreeableness, describing trustworthy and affectionate individuals.

N is for Neuroticism, which describes people who are moody, anxious, and irritable. 

Marketers can focus on targeted communication by considering these Big 5 personality test factors. For instance, if the target market segment of a food brand comprises introverts, they can run an ad showing a person enjoying a meal from the food brand at home in peace, alone in front of their TV, after a long day at work. 

Lifestyle

Lifestyle describes how individuals prefer living their lives. For instance, an athlete will have a completely different lifestyle than a businessman. 

For marketers, lifestyle can be boiled down to daily habits and the choice of brands. Taking the same example again, a professional athlete is likely to sport Nike or Adidas, while a businessman may choose to don Tom Ford or similar. 

Attitude

Attitudes are external factors that take shape in an individual belonging to a certain demographic. They can be one’s cultural or sociological upbringing, or even religious. 

Let’s take a modern-day example. 

The Gen-Z population is the next big market segment. For this target market, marketers have to be more conscious about their attitudes toward sustainability practices like green marketing.

Parting Thoughts

Psychographic segmentation is qualitative and helps marketers dive deeper into consumer behaviour and create a better relationship with the customer, which is incredibly important for business success today.