How to Use Psychographics in Marketing + Examples

A focus group brings together a carefully selected, demographically diverse set of potential clients for a guided discussion about a product or service. Some marketers go beyond demographics by taking psychographic data into consideration, looking at attitudes, values, and desires. Conventional wisdom says you can perform audience segmentation by studying demographics such as age, location, and education of your target audience. Additionally, you can leverage demographic data to understand the motivations of different customer segments.

One of the most potent applications of psychographic data is in refining customer segmentation. When using platforms like DataCalculus, organizations can combine social media insights with other psychographic data to achieve a holistic view of the customer journey. Analyzing interactions on social media platforms, blogs, and forums helps reveal customer sentiments and interests. In today’s digital age, much of the psychographic data can be gleaned from customers’ online behavior. One of the simplest yet most effective ways to gather psychographic data is through well-designed surveys.

According to Pratt, the company quickly realized that it occupied a potentially large niche between “extreme” outdoor retailers that focus on performance, and more casual, fashion-oriented outdoors apparel brands. In general, the utilization of psychographic data can assist companies and organizations in better understanding their target audiences and creating more successful marketing plans. A focus group is a group of people, typically not affiliated with your company, who participate in a discussion about your brand and your products.

2. Focus Groups and In-Depth Interviews

Understanding the personalities of your target audience also helps you create the right brand personality for your business and communicate this with your product. With psychographic data, Apple can communicate luxury, minimalism, and class psychographic data to its target audience and also create marketing strategies for the different psychographic segments. Once you've collected psychographic data, you can conduct a segmentation analysis to identify distinct psychographic segments within your audience. AIO focuses on the interests and activities of your target audience. Grouping individuals based on their hobbies, activities and lifestyle choices, such as fitness enthusiasts, foodies or travellers, helps you to get closer to your target audience. It involves analysing characteristics, beliefs, motivations, emotions, and interests to identify distinct consumer groups.

• Social status is about how people perceive themselves in society's hierarchy, often related to their income level, education, occupation, or community standing.
• When you address the unique values and motivations of each psychographic segment, your marketing messages connect to specific interests or passions they care deeply about in a way other marketing efforts can’t.
• When we talk about demographics, we’re talking about the structure of the population.

The importance of psychographics in marketing strategy

You've crafted your marketing campaign using the tried-and-true method of segmenting your audience by demographics. For example, ApartmentList’s monthly surveys illustrate how recurring research can reveal shifts in attitudes and motivations across seasons or product cycles. Understanding these patterns helps refine your market segmentation and turn surface-level findings into actionable insights.

How psychographic surveys can be useful to your business

Using various data points (e.g. national historical data of criminal offenders, demographic data, psychographics and crime severity), algorithms are used to aid jail sentencing and parole decision-making. In the movie ‘Minority Report’ people are arrested for future crimes which haven’t taken place yet. Hilton developed a mobile app for Facebook called Holiday MatchMaker, which personalizes messages to its users based on personality types and lifestyle preferences inferred from social media likes or mini personality quizzes. Using segmentation data based on demographic, geographic and psychographic data, highly differentiated target groups can be identified (e.g. location, ethnicity, beliefs, opinions, current sentiments, biggest fears), which are then contacted using tailored messages to improve communication effectiveness. Psychographic data analysis can also be used to influence attitudes and beliefs, potentially swaying voting decisions. Using demographic and psychographic data, search queries and historical product purchase patterns of existing consumers, Target is able to predict current life situations of existing customers.

Psychographic data vs. demographic data

Quantitatively, you could run a follow-up survey or look at your customer database to see what percentage of people fit each segment description. It often helps to segment at a high level first, then refine. You'll be analyzing data for patterns, grouping people, and then using those groupings in your marketing strategy. If one segment consistently has higher engagement on Instagram versus WhatsApp, you know to focus more resources there for that group.

The right segment might be people in the millennial age range who share a common set of psychographic attributes. This segmentation type can be more complex, though, as it requires access to a company's relevant data. It's similar to demographic segmentation but focuses on organizations instead and is often used in business-to-business marketing. Psychographic segmentation works by grouping potential customers based on their beliefs, values, lifestyles, opinions and interests.