Psychographic Segmentation

Abhijeet Pratap
Page content

A Beginners’ Guide to Psychographic Segmentation

The road to business success starts from knowing your customers’ needs and wants well. Businesses and marketers segment their users to understand their needs and to satisfactorily cater to their needs and preferences. Effective segmentation is key to effective marketing, sales and superior customer satisfaction.

Marketers use various types of segmentation including demographic, geographic, psychographic and behavioral. We have discussed demographic segmentation as well as its benefits and drawbacks in a previous post. While demographic segmentation can be easy to begin with, marketers are focusing deeper on the behavioral and psychological aspects of the consumer buying process.

In this post, we will discuss psychographic segmentation and how it can help marketers gain a better view of their target audiences and their needs and preferences.

Psychographic segmentation is a marketing strategy of dividing a target market based on psychological and lifestyle characteristics, values, attitudes, interests, and behaviors of individuals or groups. While demographic segmentation focuses mainly on the observable traits like age, gender and income, psychographic segmentation focuses on understanding the motivations, preferences, and lifestyles of consumers.

Here’s a detailed overview of psychographic segmentation, its distinct features, and benefits:

Distinct Features of Psychographic Segmentation:

1. Psychological Factors:

Psychographic segmentation considers the psychological aspects of consumer behavior and buying decisions like personality, values, attitudes, and perceptions. It aims to understand the emotional and cognitive drivers influencing consumer behavior. There can be several psychological factors that affect our preferences. While consumers may have similar needs, their preferences might depend on their personality and perceptions. Psychographic segmentation seeks to segment consumers based on these motivations and other psychological drivers of buying behavior. It helps understand the minutes of consumer buying behavior and factors influencing individual consumers’ choices.

2. Lifestyle Characteristics:

Psychographic segmentation looks at the way individuals live, their activities, interests, opinions (AIO), and general lifestyle choices. It goes beyond basic demographics to capture the essence of how people spend their time and what they find important. Rather than limiting itself to the most easily observable characteristics, psychographic segmentation observes target audiences at a deeper level to uncover their interests and the types of activities that indulge them as well as their opinions regarding various things. These things affect how people think about certain brands and products. People’s interests and opinions also influence their buying patterns.

3. Interests and Hobbies:

Psychographic segmentation takes into account the hobbies, interests, and recreational activities of individuals. Understanding what people enjoy in their leisure time can help tailor marketing messages and offerings. People’s interests and hobbies have a significant impact on what they buy, how they buy and when they buy it. If someone is interested in gaming, he may also be interested in buying gaming laptops and accessories. People interested in music buy subscriptions of online streaming channels. Taking interests and hobbies into account helps marketers get a better picture of consumer behavior and create more targeted marketing messages.

4. Values and Beliefs:

Identifying the values and beliefs of a target audience helps in aligning marketing strategies with the core principles that resonate with consumers. This approach is particularly relevant when promoting products or services with ethical or socially responsible attributes. Psychographic segmentation focuses on values and beliefs since these factors bear a relationship with individual buying behavior. Moreover, it helps understand what businesses must avoid in terms of marketing to avoid hurting consumers’ feelings advertently or inadvertently. However, understanding customer values and beliefs also helps businesses provide them a superior customer experience and build stronger relationships with consumers.

5. Attitude Toward Products and Brands:

Psychographic segmentation explores the attitudes and perceptions individuals have towards specific products, brands, or industries. This insight aids marketers in crafting messages that align with consumers’ existing attitudes. It might be difficult to change consumer perceptions regarding specific products or brands. However, marketing messages can be crafted in a manner to align with them. It is also highly relevant in terms of customer experience. Moreover, this type of data helps marketers understand what type of products, brands, experiences and marketing strategies work with their customers’ existing attitudes and perceptions.

6. Social Class and Status:

While related to demographics, psychographic segmentation goes further by considering the social class and status individuals aspire to or identify with. This can impact the types of products or experiences consumers desire. Social class or social status are also relevant in terms of the psychological aspect of buying. Sometimes people may purchase certain products because they want to feel like a part of a particular class. This is the case with automobiles, consumer electronics products and hospitality services. Understanding how social class and status affect buying behavior helps provide a better customer experience. Social class and status are not always related to income but they can be significant factors in terms of consumer behavior and have a psychological relevance in terms of marketing and customer relationship.

7. Opinion Leadership:

Psychographic segmentation identifies opinion leaders—individuals who influence others in their social circles. Targeting opinion leaders can have a ripple effect, as their preferences and recommendations may impact a broader audience. These people affect others’ opinions and buying behavior which makes it easier to target a broader segment by targeting what affects the opinion leaders. As you see, social media influencers have become prominent in terms of marketing on the social media channels since they can influence millions of others. Companies buy their services to promote their brands and products.

Benefits of Psychographic Segmentation:

1. Deeper Understanding of Customer Motivations:

Psychographic segmentation provides a deeper understanding of what motivates customers, helping businesses tailor their marketing messages to resonate with specific emotional and psychological drivers. The real drivers of consumer behavior are deeper than just age, gender, or income but can be related to someone’s personal experience and his interests. Some people may avoid particular types of products or may have strong opinions against them. There are several psychological factors also at play when a customer purchases a product. Sometimes, these purchases may be related to social class and sometimes to particular feelings. It helps understand what types of products or customer experiences or marketing methods are expected to trigger the best response from individual consumers.

Only a surface understanding of the factors that motivate consumers to buy will not be sufficient for marketers in this hypercompetitive. Segmentation needs to focus on those aspects of buying behavior that are more likely to affect consumer behavior at individual level. Psychographic segmentation helps build a deeper understanding of consumer motivations and how their interests, attitudes and opinions affect their buying behavior and decisions.

2. Personalized Marketing Strategies:

By understanding consumers’ lifestyles, interests, and values, businesses can create highly personalized marketing strategies. This can include tailored content, product recommendations, and promotional offers that are more likely to engage and convert. It is the era of personalization where a superior understanding of the individual preferences of consumers is important for building long term relationships.

Moreover, personalized marketing strategies stand out from the crowd and are more effective at engaging customers. Rather than targeting a large segment of customers, it is important for marketers to develop buyer personas based on psychographic segmentation and accordingly target customers. Broad segmentation on the basis of demographic data or behavioral data does not allow for the degree of personalization which is possible when marketers rely on psychographic data for segmentation. A higher degree of personalization tends to improve customer loyalty and customer satisfaction.

3. Enhanced Brand Loyalty:

Brands that align with consumers’ values and lifestyles tend to foster stronger connections. Psychographic segmentation allows businesses to build brand loyalty by creating an emotional connection with their target audience. A stronger connection with your target audience results in long lasting customer relationships which is critical to building higher consumer loyalty. Consumers are looking for products that suit their lifestyles and personalities. The same is true about the marketing messages and campaigns. If they come across something about a brand that is emotionally satisfying, it tends to grow their inclination and loyalty towards that brand.

4. Targeted Product Development:

Insights gained from psychographic segmentation can guide product development. Businesses can create products that align with the preferences and needs of specific psychographic segments, increasing the likelihood of success in the market. Businesses need to create products that satisfy their consumers’ needs and preferences in a superior manner. However, to achieve that they need to have the knowledge about several factors like the features which make a product more suited for particular lifestyles and values. By knowing about these features, businesses can develop strategies and products aligning with customer expectations.

Targeted product development that accounts for these psychological factors including lifestyles, values, interests and opinions can help businesses find faster growth. Such products can quickly garner popularity and the business might need to invest less in marketing and promotions. So, just the demographic or behavioral data would not be sufficient to develop products that satisfy your customers fully. Considering the psychological aspects of buying helps develop products that match consumers’ criteria and offer higher value and satisfaction.

5. Effective Communication Channels:

Knowing the lifestyle and media preferences of a target audience helps in selecting the most effective communication channels. This ensures that marketing messages reach the right people through channels they are most likely to engage with. Psychographical segmentation helps you develop an understanding of your target audience that helps improve communication with them. While businesses are using several channels for communicating with customers and driving higher engagement, it is important to know about the best channels for targeting individual customers and communicate effectively. A knowledge of the right channels as well as the right style of communication during the right period is important for efficient marketing. While sometimes email marketing may be better for targeting specific consumer segments, at other times, you will find that other customers prefer Whatsapp or Snapchat.

6. Increased Customer Satisfaction:

Personalizing products and services based on psychographic insights leads to higher customer satisfaction. When customers feel understood and catered to on a personal level, they are more likely to remain loyal to a brand.

Businesses want to maximize customer satisfaction from their products and services. However, they need to design customer experiences that satisfy customers. With psychographic segmentation, it becomes easier for businesses to create products, marketing campaigns and customer experiences that are more appealing to individual customers. The insights gathered from psychographic segmentation helps at improving several aspects of business including product design, quality of service, marketing campaigns and so on. These changes lead to higher customer trust and satisfaction. Individual consumers understand that the brand is dedicated to fulfilling their needs and understands their personal preferences well.

Many times it is due to a lack of the understanding of the psychological aspects of consumer behavior that businesses fail to satisfy customers. In such a situation, customers tend to switch to other brands that provide more personalized experiences.

7. Competitive Advantage:

Businesses that effectively utilize psychographic segmentation gain a competitive advantage. By targeting specific niches with personalized strategies, they differentiate themselves from competitors who may rely solely on demographic or geographic segmentation.

There are a large number of brands that have gained a strong competitive edge and built a unique identity for themselves with the help of psychographic segmentation. It helps them recognize unfulfilled needs or the needs and wants of particular segments that can be satisfied in a better manner. These businesses rather than targeting particular segments have targeted the emotions of specific consumer groups with success to connect with them. Brands like Zara or H&M and ASOS are not targeting specific income groups. They are targeting lifestyles and how they have changed with time. It has helped these brands achieve a strong competitive advantage and grow faster in their local and foreign markets. Such fast expansion is not possible without a deeper understanding of buyer psychology and what tends to appeal to their personal values and lifestyles.

As consumer preferences and trends evolve, psychographic segmentation allows businesses to adapt quickly. By staying attuned to shifts in values and lifestyles, companies can modify their strategies to remain relevant in the market. Consumer trends can change fast. There are several factors that affect these changes, some of which may be technological in nature. However, understanding consumer psychology and focusing on the psychographic aspects of consumer behavior helps businesses grow their adaptability to these changes.

Worldwide, lifestyles have changed fast. People have adopted healthier lifestyles and want to remain active. However, apart from being physically active, people like to live stressful lives.

In recent years, consumer trends in the fashion sector have shifted towards Athleisure products. Nike has successfully targeted this change and experienced solid growth. Nike is already known to target consumer psychology and emotions through its marketing campaigns rather than targeting a particular age group or class.

In this way, psychographic segmentation has helped businesses like Nike to develop strategies that will boost its adaptability to changing consumer trends. Its focus is not just on its products but satisfying the lifestyle needs of consumers.

In summary, psychographic segmentation offers a nuanced understanding of consumers’ psychological and lifestyle characteristics, enabling businesses to create more targeted and effective marketing strategies. This approach goes beyond traditional demographic segmentation, allowing organizations to connect with customers on a deeper, more meaningful level.