Psychographics

Psychographics have been applied to the study of personality, values, opinions, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles. Psychographic segmentation is a technique for grouping populations into sub-groups according to similar psychological variables.

Psychographic studies of individuals or communities can be valuable in the fields of marketing, demographics, opinion research, prediction, and social research in general. Psychographic attributes can be contrasted with demographic variables (such as age and gender), behavioral variables (such as purchase data or usage rate), and organizational descriptors (sometimes called firmographic variables), such as industry, number of employees, and functional area.

Psychographic methods gained prominence in the 2016 US presidential election and the opposing campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, with the latter using them extensively in microtargeting advertisements to narrow constituencies.

Uses

Psychographics is utilised in the field of marketing and advertising to understand the preferences of consumers and to predict behavior/patterns. Private research companies conduct psychographic research using proprietary techniques. For example, VALS is a proprietary framework created by Strategic Business Insights that separates US adults into eight distinct types by evaluating their motivations and resources to understand anticipated consumer behavior. Psychographics is often used for market segmentation and improved target marketing.

Psychographic segmentation is also applied to other fields and across cultures in order to understand motivations and behavior including in healthcare, politics, tourism and lifestyle choices.