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This is part of a series of business development action tools created by Anthony Davis of Brightwater Business Coaching,
guiding you to develop an even better business than you have today.
Take actions recommended and watch your business thrive.
Psychographics is the study of personality, values, attitudes, interests, opinions and lifestyles.
Psychographic studies of individuals or communities can be valuable in the fields of marketing,
demography, opinion research and social research in general. They can be contrasted with
demographic variables (such as age and gender), behavioural variables (such as usage rate or
loyalty), and for B2B analysis and marketing, organizational demographic variables such as industry,
number of employees, and functional area.
Psychographics should not be confused with demographics, for example, historical generations may
be defined both by demographics, such as the years in which a particular generation is born or even
the fertility rates of that generation's parents, but also by psychographic variables like attitudes,
personality formation, and cultural touchstones. For example, the traditional approaches to defining
the Baby Boom Generation or Generation X or Millennials have relied on both demographic variables
(classifying individuals based on birth years) and psychographic variables (such as beliefs, attitudes,
values and behaviours and opinions).
Psychographics can also be seen as an equivalent of the concept of "culture" when it is used for
segmentation at a national level.
When a relatively complete profile of a person or group's psychographic make-up is constructed, this
is called a "psychographic profile". The information enables the development of Marketing Personas.
Personas in Marketing
In marketing and user-centred design, personas are fictional characters created to represent the
different user types within a targeted demographic, attitude and/or behaviour set that might use a
website, brand or product in a similar way. Marketers may use personas together with market
segmentation, where the qualitative personas are constructed to be representative of specific
segments.
Personas are useful in considering the goals, desires, and limitations of brand buyers and users in
order to help to guide decisions about a service, product or interaction space such as features,
interactions, and visual design of a website. Personas may also be used as part of a user-centred
design process for designing software and are also considered a part of interaction design, having
been used in industrial design and more recently for online marketing purposes.
A user persona is a representation of the goals and behaviour of a hypothesized group of users. In
most cases, personas are synthesized from data collected from interviews with users. They are
captured in 1–2 page descriptions that include behaviour patterns, goals, skills, attitudes, and
environment, with a few fictional personal details to make the persona a realistic character. For each
product, more than one persona is usually created, but one persona should always be the primary
focus for the design.