For our #FlashBackFriday, here’s the Captain of the Starship, Geoffrey Bowll, and his serious hat game, talking psychographics in 2008. From our 2013 post on the topic:
We are different people at different times. When you’re playing soccer with your mates for a 40th birthday at 7am, that’s you being ‘Mr sporty/blokey/modern’. When you’re eating breakfast with said mates and a good-looking woman of 30ish walks into the café, instantly you’re ‘Mr Sophisticated businessman who might be a great boyfriend.’ Depending upon the occasion, you can be any of hundreds of possible people who float around inside your head, and only pop up to the surface when required. How many of us males are James Bond one minute, Brad Pitt the next? The various people you live within will often determine how you react to marketers messages. Why will you buy a certain beer? If you’re with that soccer playing crowd, you’d buy Boags. If you’re drinking with their dads, you might get a VB. It’s often to fit in, often to confirm where you see yourself.
This is a real head-ache for marketers who want to be able to neatly slot punters into easily hit demographics. But humans ain’t like that, and that, in a nutshell, is what makes our career so interesting and so frustrating at the same time.
Psychographics give you more meaningful, powerful brands. They are a move beyond simple, dumb demographics. You segment consumers by lifestyle, attitudes, beliefs, values, personality, buying motives, and pattern of product use. The psychographic characteristics of a market affect not only advertising but also packaging and channels of distribution –anything that is your brand has a definite psychological finger print, whether you want it to or not. Although many decisions are based on assumptions about the psychological make-up of our customers, in OZ it’s very much an under-used marketing discipline.