Psychographics

The term psychographics as commonly used refers to a methodological approach, often employed by marketing or advertising researchers, that aims to classify consumers into groups or, lifestyles, based upon a range of shared psychosocial characteristics. (Specific individual psychosocial characteristics are also sometimes referred to as psychographics; though for clarity, this entry will refer to such characteristics as psychographic variables.) Psychographic techniques are particularly useful to the process of segmentation of target markets. Occasionally, the term lifestyle marketing is used to describe marketing efforts that are developed based on findings from psychographic research. Unlike demographics, which concerns the evaluation of characteristics that can be measured, categorized, or observed directly (e.g., level of income, level of education achieved, age in years), psychographics are used to describe the ...