Psychographics

Psychographics are audience segmentation methods that discover actionable audience segments by examining individual psychological, sociological, and anthropological factors—such as motivations, attitudes, self-concept, and lifestyle—that influence a particular decision about a product, person, ideology, or medium.

Although researchers Russell Haley and Emanuel Demby both claimed to originate the term psychographics in 1965, rapidly expanding technological access to audience descriptors in the following decades delayed a settled understanding of the concept. To illustrate the confusion, Heath writes that such widely used research techniques as geodemographics, which is generally considered psychographics, is not psychographics, whereas much survey-based research that includes a measurable attitude, interest, opinion, or lifestyle question is psychographics. Gunter and Furnham conversely classify attitudes and opinions research as psychographics, but suggest that lifestyle research is not. Rebecca Piirto Heath in 1995 dismissed as psychographics research any qualitative techniques such as focus groups, projective techniques, in-depth interviewing, and emotional probing. Yet in a 1996 article, she labeled these so-called psycho-qualitative tools as an important and growing trend in psychographics. Increasingly, any distinctions have been further weakened by a near-total knowledge of the behavior of individual consumers available through giant databases. Traditionally, the four major classifications of psychographic studies focused on geodemographics, personal values, lifestyles, and life cycles.