Psychographic segmentation is the one of the key pillars to formulating successful strategies and plans which aim to achieve business objectives.
The core of any strategy is knowing your audience. Who are you going to talk to? What do they do? Where do they live? How do they interact?
Grouping your current, prospective or past customers into segments based on their behavior, attitude, belief, lifestyle, interests et cetera is called psychographic segmentation.
Difference Between Psychographic and Demographic Segmentation
Knowing what the size of your audience is, what gender they are, where they live (and the likes) is as important as knowing what they think, how they behave and how they interact with their surroundings. This is the basic difference of psychographics and demographics.
Demographics tell you the age, gender, location of your audience while psychographics give you a picture of their life. Demographics can yield insightful quantitative data while psychographics will give you a detailed qualitative data on your audience.
So when you devise a strategy, you formulate it on a combination of knowing his age, sex and area but also keeping in mind, where does he shop, how does he go outside, what is his lifestyle. An accumulation of all factors gives us an idea of who we want to talk to and HOW.
The cornerstone of a good psychographic segmentation practice is to observe, observe and observe more. While there is a method to this madness, the results won’t be very fruitful if you are not always on the lookout to watch the behavior of those around.
‘Insights lie in the eyes of the beholder’ – Word to the wise.
So how do you start dissecting and segmenting your audience?
Categories or Ways to Do Psychographic Segmentation
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By Look-Alike Personality
Define what your product is. Give it a personality. Take that personality and see who would like to use, leverage, benefit or exploit your brand as this becomes your first checkpoint of psychographic segmentation. Dividing your audience into large buckets of personalities owing to the difference and similarities in their behavior will help you know who to target and who not to. A lot of qualitative analysis will go into discovering the likes and dislikes of your homogenous sample but at the end, you’ll have a broad category of audience, simply listed into basic personalities, making it greatly easy for you to communicate to whoever you like.
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By Lifestyle
People belonging from different sects in life have completely different lifestyles. From different income brackets to difference in upbringing and exposure, people can be classified into who they are, based on the life they have lived so far. This psychographic segmentation helps you determine how important is your product or brand in someone’s life. How do you create a need for yourself within the lifestyle of your consumer? Which lifestyle do you want to target? Educated, upper class who travels every 6 months for a holiday? Or, a single breadwinner who strives for three meals a day for his family? Dividing your audience will give you a clearer picture of your role as you strategize your brand.
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By Point-of-View
Perhaps, the toughest bucket to fill in psychographic segmentation. Knowing what your audience thinks about different aspects of life. Understanding how religions, cultures, politics, interests and hobbies shape up a person’s mind. The topics mentioned here are at grass root level of thought, where your planning should begin. Knowing your audience’s opinion will help you drive your brands opinion in their minds as you learn to communicate with them directly.
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By Occasions and Events
Knowing how your audience reacts to events is another important bucket in psychographic segmentation. People have varied beliefs and practices and learning their practices at a baseline level is highly important. Understanding how people collaborate, come together or disperse, perhaps, during a certain event, which may be happy or tragic will determine the thought process that you need to, either leverage or let go.
While these buckets are a scratch on the surface for psychographic segmentation, the subject is very vast and dangerously deep. The analysis of this segmentation has revealed insane insights about the audience that brands, all around the world, have leveraged and gained profound impact. Perhaps, we can get started by just looking around us and seeing how people behave in their day-to-day lives. A good eye can give you great answers!
