How to Use Psychographic Segmentation to Build a Memorable brand

What if you could not only tell who wants your products or services, but WHY they want them?

How would your branding and messaging change if you knew the ‘why’ of your customers?

How about your tone? Would that change too?

To take your branding to that next level, where every message, every contact is personalized and relevant, you need to know why certain segments of your customers are buying and behaving the way they do.

Many business owners are familiar, even if only vaguely, with demographics. But not many are familiar with ‘psychographics’ or ‘psychographic segmentation’.

In this article, we’ll explore the concept of psychographics, what they are, and how you can use psychographic segmentation to create a memorable brand that will stand out in a sea of sameness.

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As opposed to demographics that answer the question ‘who’, psychographics help answer the question ‘why’.

Demographics used to be the only tool marketers relied on to inform marketing choices. Things have changed, however, and psychographic insights now complement demographic data in the creation of more accurate, more complete (robust) customer personas.

Segmentation is essentially slicing your customers into subgroups and categorizing those subgroups according to similar needs and preferences.

Psychographic segmentation is a marketing method used to create customer segments according to attitudes, aspirations, beliefs, and other psychological criteria. It helps you understand the motivations behind purchases and why certain segments of your audience will buy when others won’t.

It is unlike the just-the-facts-ma’am approach that demographic data takes. Although complementary, it is very different from demographics.

Take this example.

Many pregnant women take pregnancy tests. But what if the ‘why’ is different for each woman?

A little thought suggests that there are two primary groups of women who buy pregnancy test kits: the ‘fearfuls’, those who are afraid they’re pregnant, and the ‘hopefuls’, those who want to be pregnant and hope that they are.

Although they may share similar demographics, both groups have VERY different purchasing reasons.

Herein lies the power of psychographic segmentation: If you knew and understood your customers’ ‘why’, you could more closely tailor your marketing to them.

Need a clear example?

We know two people. They’re the same age and they’re both British citizens. To make the demographic distinction almost nonexistent, they’re both of royal blood.

But one is Prince Charles, the other is Ozzy Osbourne – the “Prince of Darkness”.

Would you market to those two people the same way? Definitely not!

Although they share shockingly similar demographics, their attitudes, opinions, and values are like the difference between salt and sugar.

If you want to build a memorable brand that will stand out in a sea of sameness, you need to more clearly understand your audience and their motivations.

This is what psychographic segmentation helps you do.

New to psychographics and feeling a bit lost? Jump in at the deep end with our professional marketing help!

If you include psychographic segmentation in your marketing strategy:

You’ll better understand your customers’ concerns, motivations, and goals.
You’ll understand how customers use your products and more importantly, why they do.
You can customize your products for different personas once you understand how they use your products and why they do.
You can go beyond behavioral segmentation by including attitudes, opinions, and other psychological factors that demographics and other segmentation techniques do not handle.
You can create data-driven customer profiles by leveraging psychographic data..
Now that you know that psychographic segmentation can help you create a memorable brand, let’s first take a look at some of the elements that constitute psychographic data.

Demographic information will typically include age, gender, income, marital status, and so on – just the dry facts.

In contrast, psychographic variables are typically any attributes relating to personality, attitudes, values, and so on – anything that indicates where a customer’s interests lie.

Because psychographics are much more difficult to observe than most demographics, and because they are opinion-based rather than factual, they are much more difficult to measure and quantify.

This is why you will need to regularly quiz your audience, through methods we’ll cover later, to find out what they really want.

Meanwhile, we’ll explore some of the most important psychographic variables.

Personality describes the collection of traits that a person exhibits consistently over a long period of time. And the five big personality traits are:

Agreeableness
Neuroticism
Openness to new experiences
Extroversion
Conscientiousness
This is logically the first step in psychographic segmentation, as each consumer’s personality affects the way they respond to marketing stimuli.

Here are two contrasting examples.

A fishing company might find, from a survey, that the majority of their audience is introverted men who enjoy spending time alone. Images of a lone fisherman facing a brilliant orange sunset, rod in hand, will resonate deeply with these people.

At the other end of the scale, there is the rebellious, thrill-seeking man who also loves the outdoors. He is an extrovert and enjoys spending time with other people. The Harley Davidson motorcycle brand is famous for targeting this segment. All their imagery and copy speaks specifically to this group.

You really cannot ignore the personality of your customers. It is the basic ingredient that will inform all your design and copy choices.

A person’s lifestyle consists of all their day-to-day activities, where they spend their time, who they spend their time with, and where they live.

A family that lives on a quiet, sprawling ranch will make different choices to a family that lives in frantic New York.

Understanding your customers’ lifestyle can help you position your product or service as a solution to issues your customers face.

While this approach is mainly relevant to B2C brands, it can also be applied to a B2B context based on a company’s life cycle.

It doesn’t matter that the Toyota Corolla is a fantastic, affordable car that will last for years. Prince Charles wouldn’t be caught dead in one.

Why?

He’s a Prince, not a peasant. His social class doesn’t permit him to ride in such common cars.

Social class influences pricing as well as product choice. And each social class has its preferred clothing brands, vehicles, and holiday destinations.

Sometimes it isn’t that your product sucks. You’re just putting it in front of the wrong people.

A person’s interests include hobbies and pastimes, and can be indicated by the websites they visit and what they spend the majority of their time doing.

And where there is interest, there is usually buyer intent. All you need to do is to put your brand in front of people who are already interested in your offering.

Only then can they excitedly say, “This is for me and me alone!”

Most people’s values and attitudes are tied closely to their culture and religion, both of which structure their sense of right and wrong.

Understanding your audience’s mental framework can help you create marketing that touches them in a special way.

If, for instance, you deliver food and discover that many of your customers are passionate about the environment, you can make a better impression by delivering in biodegradable containers.

The way to make your business stand out is to tune your messaging and branding such that every contact between you and your customers is personalized.

You now know what psychographic variables are important. So how can you obtain this data?

Which method will work best for your type of business? Which methods get the most accurate information?

Here, we’ll explore four effective approaches to collecting psychographic data from your customers.

If you want information about your customers, the best people to ask are your customers themselves. Don’t just wing it; ask what they care about.

Send them surveys and questionnaires. Explain that you’re trying to get information you can use to serve them better. Many people will happily fill out forms if they believe they will benefit.

There are many tools you can use to send out surveys, including Google Consumer Survey, SurveyMonkey, and SurveyGizmo.

The trick with using surveys is to ask both open- and closed-ended questions to get the clearest picture of your audience’s needs.

For example, if you were running an electric car company (like Tesla), these are some of the questions you could ask:

“What do you think about electric cars?”

“Which models of car have you owned in the past 7 years?”

“If an electric-powered car was the same as a gasoline-powered one, would you consider purchasing one?”

Yes
No
Maybe


“I like long road trips.”

Strongly disagree
Disagree
Neutral
Agree
Strongly agree


Get the idea? The goal is to ask a variety of questions so you can get a more complete image of your customers.

With open-ended questions, you need to make sure you’re asking questions that reveal their motivations. If you ask “Why do you buy running shoes?”, you might get a vague answer like “Because I like them”.

Instead, ask “Why did you recently buy running shoes?”. These kinds of questions help the customer to tell you ‘why’, which is the question you really need answers to.

For closed-ended questions, ask the customer to choose from a number of options you present to them, like in the Likert scale below.

Ask your customers the right questions and they’ll give you insightful answers that you can use to improve your products and services.

In some cases, the best course of action is to talk to your customers directly. Doing phone, video, or even in-person interviews can help you uncover things you wouldn’t get with an online survey.

Resist the temptation to interview only satisfied customers. Unsatisfied customers may not be right all the time, but you will often get useful insights.

Ideally, you should do five interviews per customer persona so that you get enough data to identify patterns and trends over a wide selection of your audience.without spending an exorbitant amount of time or money in the process.

As far as the structure of the interview goes, keep it conversational. Let it flow organically so it doesn’t feel robotic and forced. Listen more than you speak. Let your customers express themselves and you’ll get to the underlying reasons.

It helps, however, to have a few handy questions that you can use as a springboard to get valuable insights. For example:

What motivated you to buy our product?
Which problems did it solve?
How did our product help solve the problems?
What factors motivated you to choose our company over our competitors?
If you used someone else’s products in the past, what made you switch to us?
Just remember to keep it light and conversational.

Focus groups consist of a carefully selected, demographically diverse set of people who you bring together to talk about your product.

You can easily create testing audiences that you hand pick. They are great when you want to expose your product or campaign to your target customers to get feedback.

You should, however, work with a group facilitator to ensure that the discussion isn’t led astray by strong personalities in the group.

Ultimately, asking your audience is the best way to collect data that you can use for psychographic segmentation.

If you want even more information, talk to your customer service or sales teams.

They interact with your customers all day long and will inevitably have valuable insights to share. Particularly, ask them to share with you key phrases, FAQs, and specific language that your customers use.

And if you want even more data…

Facebook tracks unimaginable amounts of data, the same as its psychographic brother in arms, Google.

Between them, those two companies have mountains of data you can easily tap into to find out specifically what your audience’s needs are.

Think about it.

Every time a user likes a Facebook page, looks up a location in Google Maps, or watches a video, their interests are being tracked.

Even something as basic as a Google search can track users’ interests.

In short, there is a never-ending psychographic survey going on at all times. And if you have the resources, fire up Facebook or Google Analytics to extract the data you need about your audience.

Once you have all the data you need and you now have a clearer picture of who most of your audience is and their motivations, you’d do well to apply the knowledge to optimizing all your channels.



Tweak your emails. Once you have defined your customer segments and understood why they use your products, you can then send targeted personalized emails to them. If they want to buy sports footwear from you, but love hiking (lifestyle), send them emails that are hiking-centric. Send emails focused on running to runners, on sneakers to office workers for their lunchtime power-walk, on cycling shoes to cyclists, on top-brand names to fashionistas, and so on.
Tweak your blogging strategy. Now that you know some of the bird lovers who frequent your bird website want to give gifts, why not write gift-buying guides just for them? You’ll most likely see a spike in conversion rates.
Tweak your website architecture. Since you now better understand your audience and its segments, categorize the resources on your website accordingly, so each segment can find what they’re looking for quickly and easily.
Hone your ads. You can use psychographic data to hone your ads and make them more targeted and more personalized.

Porsche.

Yes, Porsche.

Before the introduction of the new Porsche 911, sales of the outgoing models languished. So they did their psychographic research and discovered that, although their target demographic were willing to pay $100,000 for a car, fewer and fewer were willing to shell out $100,000 for a weekend car.

And so the plan was to target the psychographic profile of consumers who wanted a sports car they could use daily.

Porsche USA’s CEO, Michael Bartsch, made the company change their visuals for marketing campaigns. And this time, the ads told people that they didn’t need a long, winding road to enjoy all that the Porsche 911 had to offer. They could use it every day.

There was even an ad with a yellow Porsche parked outside a school building, with the copy saying ‘school bus’.

The result?

Porsche saw a 35% increase in 911 vehicle sales in the first two months of the campaign.

The question is not whether psychographics work or not. The question is whether you are asking your customers the right questions.

Confused? And maybe feeling a bit lost? Hop on a call today! Our team of experts can give you professional marketing advice.