What is psychographic segmentation?

Psychographic segmentation is the research methodology used for studying consumers and dividing them into groups using psychological characteristics including personality, lifestyle, social status, activities, interests, opinions, and attitudes.

Psychographic segmentation’s emphasis on characteristics like personality and values differs from demographic segmentation, which uses a specific trait (like gender, age, income, etc.) to categorize potential audiences. 

Market researchers use psychographic characteristics to help develop and position their products and marketing messages for different target groups.

Marketers use both demographics and psychographics in their market research to create their marketing strategy. This information adds detail to buyer personas that guide brand positioning, product development, and marketing messaging.

Psychographic marketing enables you to engage with multiple target audiences in the ways that will make the biggest impact for each one. This approach saves time and money on approaches that might fall flat and makes it easier to relate to the groups you care about.

You can use psychographics for market segmentation to understand:

One type of psychographic segmentation involves buyer personas. A buyer persona is a fictional profile of a potential customer that might include their title or role at work, their personal preferences, their challenges, or aspects of their lifestyle. 

The buyer persona represents both the facts and reasons for behaviors. Buyer personas are a first step in understanding your potential customer’s journey, or the steps they take before, during, and after they purchase your product.

You can also use psychographic research to develop different marketing strategies, services, experiences, and even product offerings for each of your segments. 

For instance, it is common to offer the same product or service with fewer features to price-conscious customers. Customers who don’t care about price but like more features can buy the same product, with more features, at a higher price.

You might find that some of your customers value convenience while others care about customer support. If you divide these into segments, you can adjust your marketing and services to cater to those motivations.

Surveys are a cost-effective and efficient way to collect psychographic information about your target audience. A variety of questions are used to help understand your ideal customer’s personality, lifestyle, social status, activities, interests, opinions, and attitudes.

Open-ended questions use a qualitative approach. “What is your biggest challenge with…” will provide a deeper understanding of the respondent's problems.

Likert scale questions show how much they agree or disagree with a statement, like “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree” to let you know how important it is to them. Continue reading: What is a likert scale?

Semantic differential scale questions ask people to rate a product, brand, company, or other attribute, helping you understand their attitude.

For effective market research, you need to understand the five types of psychographic segmentation variables.

Personality. People make buying decisions based on personality all the time. Personality covers a broad spectrum of characteristics, from being open and conscientious to being an extrovert or introvert.

Attitudes. Cultural background, family-of-origin, and other factors will influence a buyer’s attitudes.

Lifestyle. Marketers search for feedback from people to better understand problems they encounter in their life. Athletes, business professionals, students, race car drivers, and soccer moms all have different lifestyles and unique challenges to solve.

Social Status.  A person's social status, often associated with their income, will influence if they buy basic items, luxury goods, or anything in between. Understanding the social status of your customers will influence your pricing, messaging, distribution channels, and marketing mix.

Activities, Interests, and Opinions (AIO). What do your customers like to do in their free time? Are they political, a movie binge watcher, or a night owl? Their AIO will influence how you position your products and attract their interest.

When combined, these variables create unique psychographic segments that make up specific target audiences. We’ll break down each of these characteristics in the following sections.

There are many ways to describe a personality, but one of the easiest to remember and most commonly used is OCEAN.

OCEAN describes 5 aspects of a personality. Each aspect has a range from high to low that describes that trait. Psychographic segmentation marketing studies these aspects to understand how they influence a buyer’s behavior.

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