Understanding Psychographics

Segmentation, Demographics and Psychographics
Segmentation is the concept of grouping people with similar demographics and psychographics together. The combination of demographic and psychographic information can provide valuable insights into your best customers – allowing you to find more like them.

• Demographics looks at characteristics of people that include age, income, education, occupation, household size, home ownership and home value, among other factors.
• Psychographics delves deeper into people's lifestyles and behaviors, including their interests and values.

Psychographic Information

Understanding the psychographics of your target market can be very revealing. Information about their likes and dislikes goes a long way in making determinations about whether or not they are likely to purchase your product or service. With information about their preferences and lifestyles, you can successfully target the segments most interested in your product/service and effectively reach them with a message that speaks directly to them. Psychographics provides details that will help you effectively spend your marketing dollars – rather than sending a mailing to everyone in the area, you can send direct mail to those people who will likely respond and make a purchase.

Claritas offers a number of solutions that integrate psychographics as well as demographics for a complete target marketing package:

• ConsumerPoint^® – A comprehensive and powerful target marketing software system that harnesses the collective power of market demographics, customer segmentation and psychographics to increase marketing effectiveness. ConsumerPoint connects your customer information to the market, allowing you to compare trends in your internal data against competitive, market and industry benchmarks to uncover valuable and exploitable gaps in your markets.

• ConneXions™ – Telecommunications, Internet, cable and satellite service providers have an increasing need to determine how to cost-effectively and efficiently retain and cross-sell existing customers while continuing to acquire new ones. In response to these needs, Claritas developed ConneXions – a household-level market segmentation system that includes psychographic information. ConneXions reveals demographics and psychographics, such as product usage, purchasing and switching behavior for a full complement of communications products and services. You’ll discover more about consumer behavior to better understand your customers and prospects.

• PRIZM^®NE – PRIZM NE was developed to update Claritas' marketing segmentation technology to correspond with the 2000 U.S. Census. PRIZM NE links your customer data with neighborhood demographics and psychographics. With PRIZM NE, you'll find customers who represent your most profitable and sustainable opportunities.

• P$YCLE^®NE – P$YCLE NE provides an actionable solution for targeting households by financial behavior. Financial marketers can rely on P$YCLE NE for psychographic information to accurately make predictions about, and better understand, customer financial or investment behaviors.

• Workplace PRIZM NE™ – Understand the psychographics of the customers who drift in and out of your market area during their workdays. You'll benefit from the power of customer segmentation where consumers work – allowing you to identify an often untapped, yet significant market of potential customers.

• iXPRESS™ – iXPRESS provides a powerful market and site analysis solution that includes a wide range of data, including demographic, consumer expenditure and consumer segmentation data. iXPRESS can report and map psychographic consumer behavior profiles for any US market, making it easy to locate hot spots containing high concentrations of target consumers.

Understanding Purchasing Behaviors

Discover more about psychographic factors such as spending patterns, brand consciousness, buying influences, attitudes, values and opinions – you’ll get answers to questions such as:

• What do they like about your product?
• What do they like about your competitor's product?
• What advertising messages had they seen prior to buying?
• How much disposable or discretionary income is available for this type of purchase?
• What are their hobbies?
• Do emotional aspects impact their purchase?
• Who is the decision-maker for this type of purchase?
• What values and attitudes play a part in this type of purchase?

Psychographics information is compiled from survey answers for a variety of topics. Respondents are required to complete a series of questions that will later be used to classify them into a segment based upon how they "feel" towards a battery of issues, messages, insights, etc.

Overall, psychographics information includes needs, benefits, values and attitudes, as well as insights about purchasing behavior and process.

Additional Psychographic Resources

The following companies offer products and services that provide additional psychographic information to enhance your marketing research and strategy decisions about market, site and customer analysis.

• Simmons Market Research Bureau – The Study of Media and Markets (SMM) is a survey of the American population, measuring media habits, lifestyle and psychographic descriptors, including product purchase behavior and beliefs, opinions and attitudes.

• Mediamark Research Inc. – The Survey of American Consumers is an ongoing, comprehensive study of the U.S. adult population covering consumer demographics, psychographics, product and brand usage, and exposure to all forms of advertising media.

• Polk Automotive – An unparalleled provider of advanced automotive information services and statistical reporting in the automotive marketplace.

• NPD/Crest Inc. – NPD Restaurant Profiles – An innovative global market information company that provides essential market information for the restaurant industry.