Research Tips

Demographics and Psychographics

Demographic data (e.g., income, age, gender) and psychographic data (values, attitudes, and lifestyle information) provide complementary insights.

Psychographic data are particularly useful when it’s important to understand not just who buys, but why they buy and how the product or service fits into a customer’s overall lifestyle or consumption habits. For this reason, psychographics are often an important consideration in market segmentation. Psychographics are also useful for providing the insights necessary to craft advertising that focuses not on product attributes, but rather on the benefits that those attributes may provide to the buyer.

Psychographics alone, though, are usually not sufficient: many marketing issues, such as determining what market to target or planning a media mix, require demographic data. However, decisions about such issues tend to be more effective if the demographic data can be linked back to psychographic data. Therefore, it’s often useful to first identify the psychographic characteristics of the target market(s), and then to determine the relative prevalence of the characteristics among different demographic groups.