Why Psychographics are way more important than demographics in your marketing mix

While segmentation as a concept has been around for a while, most marketers continue to use the lowest common denominator – demographics. Unfortunately, your reliance on simple demographics probably means that you just aren’t able to attract (let alone engage with or grow) your intended target audience.

What demographics aren’t telling you?

Let’s be honest here: Demographics are convenient. They attempt to distribute your audience into neat little groups on the basis of age, gender, education levels, and occupational criteria. The system used in India comprises 12 grades ranging from A1 to E3 (unskilled, illiterate). This worked for the longest time. It had to. There was nothing else available that even attempted to look at data on the Indian population from this perspective. But like most statistics, demographics conceal much more than they reveal! And in some cases are absolutely useless in helping you predict the actions of your customers.

Consider this:

Two men might be demographic twins. Meaning: Age = Age, Gender = Gender, Urban = Urban, Unmarried = Unmarried, No Kids = No Kids… you see where I’m going with this! However no number of similarities will tell you anything about their activities online. They could be from vastly different social strata, be comfortable in very different languages, have entirely different opinions on things, might be passionate about different causes and use media very differently from each other. The mere fact that they have similar demographic footprints is no reason to club them together.

How else then?

“Who you are talking to?” is a lot more relevant than what demographic they represent. Even if you have all the demographic data, you are never going to know anything about the person in terms of what their beliefs are, what opinions they hold dear, their feelings towards various topics or things, their attitude towards life and even the thoughts they share with the world. When you understand these things about your audience you will have taken the first step towards communicating with them rather than at them!

Welcome to the world of Psychographics!

This is no new buzzword. Truth be told, psychographics have been around for a long time as well. Just that marketing folk never realized how they could really harness this data. You see, until social media exploded on the scene, the only way for marketers to gather such data was through good old surveys and questionnaires. And what people tell you they do is in reality very different from what they actually do.

That's right folks! Especially when they think you're not looking.

But that’s just the thing! 

Today, you have the ability not only to look at what your audience is doing, but to gather meaningful information about the what, where, why, how often and when as well. This can tell you a whole lot more about their attitudes, interests, opinions, thoughts and feelings. 

This information is rich enough for you to harness its power and communicate with your audience, using things that they relate to and are passionate about! This will ensure that you are communicating the right thing, with the right people at the right time when they are most likely to act on that information! Never before in the history of marketing have we been able to achieve this level of personalization or customization.

How to plan out the ideal communication process is something we will discuss in another post.