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2.3: Psychographics

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    84067
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    Psychographics

    Lifestyle

    One of the newer and increasingly important set of factors that’s being used to understand consumer behavior is lifestyle. In this context, “lifestyle” refers to the potential customer’s pattern or being or living in the world combined with his or her psychographics (a set of attitudes, opinions, aspirations, and interests). The variables determining lifestyle are wide-ranging:

    • Activities and interests (e.g., hunter; fitness enthusiast; fashionista; foodie; lawyer; musician; pet lover; farmer; traveler; reader; homebody; crafter, etc.)
    • Opinions about oneself and the world (e.g., politically conservative; feminist; activist; entrepreneur; independent thinker; do-gooder; early adopter; technophobe; populist; explorer, etc.)

    Lifestyle variables reveal what consumers care about, how they spend their time, what they’re likely to spend money on, and how they view themselves. Inevitably these individual characteristics impact consumer decisions—and brand preference in particular. The criteria that determine lifestyle are often things consumers feel passionately about. When a consumer identifies your brand as consistent with his interests, attitudes and self-identity, it paves the way for building a long and loyal customer relationship. It is the multifaceted aspect of lifestyle research that makes it so useful in consumer analysis. A prominent lifestyle researcher, Joseph T. Plummer, summarizes the concept as follows:

    . . . lifestyle patterns combines the virtues of demographics with the richness and dimensionality of psychological characteristics . . . Lifestyle is used to segment the marketplace because it provides the broad, everyday view of consumers lifestyle segmentation and can generate identifiable whole persons rather than isolated fragments.

    Marketers are often attracted to lifestyle as a segmentation schema because it helps reveal a deeper, more vivid picture of consumers and what makes them tick. As marketers try to create strong emotional connections between the brands they promote and the consumers they serve, they are selling more than product features. They are selling a sensibility, an attitude, a set of values they hope will resonate strongly with the target segments they want to reach.

    Photo of a chocolate cake with the words Martha Stewart's Cakes.

    Oprah Winfrey and Martha Stewart are interesting comparative examples of extremely successful marketing that uses a lifestyle orientation to attract and keep devoted consumers. Both brand empires are built around strong, successful, self-made women, and they both target women consumers. Oprah Winfrey’s brand is architected to appeal to women who are socially conscious seekers, readers, idealists, self-helpers, working women, striving for balance and self-fulfillment. Martha Stewart’s brand, on the other hand, is carefully curated to appeal to women with a passion for fine food, design, beautiful surroundings, cultural experiences, arts and crafts, and the creative act of doing it yourself. The strong lifestyle-oriented identity of each brand makes it relatively easy for individual consumers to recognize which one is most consistent with their own identity and values.

    Personality

    Personality is used to summarize all the traits of a person that make him or her unique. No two people have the same personalities, but several attempts have been made to classify people with similar traits. Perhaps the best-known personality types are those proposed by Carl Jung, which are variations on the work of Jung’s teacher, Sigmund Freud. His personality categories are introvert and extrovert. The introvert is described as defensive, inner-directed, and withdrawn from others. The extrovert is outgoing, other-directed, and assertive. Over the years, several other more elaborate classifications have also been devised.

    Personality traits may also include characteristics linked to they ways people view themselves and calibrate their behavior in the world: for example, sincerity, self-confidence, empathy, self-reliance, adaptability, and aggression.

    Various personality types are likely to respond in different ways to different market offerings. For example, an extrovert may enjoy the shopping experience and rely more on personal observation to secure information. In this case, in-store promotion becomes an important communication tool. Knowing the basic personality traits of target customers can be useful information for the manager in designing the marketing mix. Marketers have found personality to be difficult to apply in many cases, primarily because it is not easy to measure personality traits. Personality tests are usually long and complex; many were developed to identify people with problems that needed medical attention. Translating these tools into useful marketing data is no small feat, and marketers have turned to lifestyle analysis instead.

    Where personality does come into play more prominently is in the notion of brand personality. Brand managers strive to cultivate strong, distinctive, recognizable personalities for the brands they promote. The personality gives dimension to the brand, opening the door for consumers to connect with the brand emotionally and identify its personality as consistent with their own values and self-identity. In this case there is a blurry line between the use of lifestyle and personality to understand and appeal to target customers. If you run down a list of super-brands, though, it is easy to recognize the power of brand personality at work: Apple, Coca-Cola, Walt Disney, Star Wars, Google, and Nike, to name a few.

    Reference Groups

    Consumer behavior can be influenced by the groups a person comes into contact with, through friendship, face-to-face interaction, and even indirect contact. Marketers often call these reference groups. A reference group may be either a formal or informal group. Examples include churches, clubs, schools, online social networks, play groups, professional groups, and even a group of friends and acquaintances. Individuals may be influenced by the groups of which they are members. They may also be influenced by aspirational groups–a reference group a person hopes to belong to one day, such as young boys hoping to grow up and become Major League Soccer (MLS) players.

    A group of skateboarders watch as another skateboarder performs an aerial stunt.

    Reference groups are characterized by having individuals who are opinion leaders for the group. Opinion leaders are people who influence others. They are not necessarily higher-income or better educated, but others may view them as having greater expertise, broader experience, or deeper knowledge of a topic. For example, a local high school teacher may be an opinion leader for parents in selecting colleges for their children. In a group of girlfriends, one or two may be the opinion leaders others look to for fashion guidance. These people set the trend and others conform to the expressed behavior. If a marketer can identify the opinion leaders for a group in the target market, then she can direct efforts towards attracting these people.

    The reference group can influence an individual in several ways:

    • Role expectations: Reference groups prescribe a role or way of behaving based on the situation and one’s position in that situation. For example, as a student, you are expected to behave in a certain basic way under certain conditions when interacting with a reference group at school.
    • Conformity: Conformity the way we modify out behavior in order to fit in with group norms. Norms are “normal” behavioral expectations that are considered appropriate within the group. To illustrate, in a school lecture setting, you might conform to the group norm of raising your hand to make a comment or question, rather than shouting out to the teacher.
    • Group communications through opinion leaders: As consumers, we are constantly seeking out the advice of knowledgeable friends or acquaintances who can provide information, give advice, or even make the decision for us. In some product categories, there are professional opinion leaders who are easy to identify, such as auto mechanics, beauticians, stock brokers, or physicians. In a school setting, an opinion leader might be a favorite teacher who does a good job explaining the material, a popular administrator who communicates well with students and parents, or a well-liked fellow student who is willing to assist when peers ask for help–or all of these individuals.
    • Word-of-mouth influence: Consumers are influenced by the things they hear other people say. This is “word-of-mouth” communication. It happens every time you ask someone for a recommendation or an opinion about a product or service, and every time someone volunteers an opinion. Do you know a good dentist? Where should we go for lunch? Have you heard that new song from . . . ? Not surprisingly, research consistently shows that word-of-mouth information from people they know is more credible than advertising and marketing messages. Word-of-mouth influence in the school reference group example might include students discussing which Spanish instructor is better, or where to shop for a dress to wear to the homecoming dance.

    Reference groups and opinion leaders are essential concepts in digital marketing, where consumers tap into a variety of social networks and online communities. Marketers need to understand which reference groups influence their target segments and who the opinion leaders within these groups are. Those leaders may be bloggers, individuals with many followers who post frequently on various social media, and even people who write lots of online reviews. Then marketing activity can focus on winning over the opinion leaders. If you manage to get the opinion leaders in your segment to “like” your product, “follow” your brand, tweet about your news and publish favorable reviews or comments on their blogs, your work with online reference groups is going well. (You’ll recall from the module on ethics that this was the strategy Microsoft adopted—and misgauged—when it attempted to influence opinion leaders with its gifts of free laptops loaded with its latest operating system.)


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