Psychographics

Psychographics is simply, the study of personality, values, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles, and is now being used widely by marketers to create both branding and product-specific advertising campaigns.

This area of research focuses on interests, activities, and opinions which are identified as IAO variables. Psychographic studies of individuals or communities can be valuable in the fields of marketing, demographics, opinion and social networking research, and development in general. Base data for these studies can be compiled from responses to email marketing newsletters, and from social, environmental and trade organization data. In most cases, these studies are conducted as part of an overall advertising strategy for large corporations or organizations and can be cost prohibitive for most small businesses.

Psychographics are usually contrasted with demographic variables, like age / gender, behavioral variables such as usage rate / loyalty, and organizational demographics variables that include data from industry in regard to the number of employees, and their prime functional area. For example, the traditional approaches to defining the “Baby Boom Generation” have relied on both demographic variables (classifying an individual as a “boomer” based on age) and psychographic variables (such as attitudes and behaviors). And once these variables are collected and identified this is called  a “psychographic profile” and most generally are used to create a target market group.