Fortunately, we now can use psychographics and sociographics to supplement the general marketing communications direction of broader age and era demographics. In addition, we analyze and account for environmental and other external factors which may affect communication with your target audience. By further segmenting the broad age categories, we can communicate more relevantly by analyzing and understanding social status, group interaction and buying habits.
This analysis allows us to think of your customer in very concrete terms, and in great detail. We can know almost everything about this person—what turns them on, what turns them off, which terms catch their attention, what holds their attention, and what makes them tune out. In short, because of our research and experience, we know how to communicate one on one, persuasively, engagingly and hyper-relevantly with any target audience.
Belonger
This largest group makes up about 40% of the population. They are the average person, in the average town, in the Midwest. They love community and being with family and friends. They frequently drive U.S.-made pick-up trucks or large U.S.-made sedans. They are very nationalistic, and don’t like change. Their best time is spending time with their friends, talking, having fun, and hanging out. They are hard working, and are extremely conservative in their views, and most likely religious. They will often buy because of personal relationships, so you need to take the time to get to know them. Belongers are very brand loyal.
Achiever
The Achiever is a group of about 5-7% of the population. This is the serious businessperson who is constantly looking to become more, and to make more. Power and physical wealth is the major stimulator that makes this person perform day in day out. This type will drive the Lexus, BMW, Mercedes, Hummer, Porsche, high-end luxury cars. In contrast to the Belonger, these people need to be individuals, to set themselves apart from the rest. They will always buy the top of the line and latest in technology. Achievers control about 90-95% of the money in the U.S. If you want to talk to Achievers, make sure you make it quick, and make sure it talks about individuality, about innovation, and most of all, about power, money, and profit.
Emulator
Emulators make up about 15% of the population. Each one in this group would love to be an Achiever, but isn’t. The emulator will try to do anything to make him or herself look like an Achiever with the goal of attracting the opposite sex or the approval of peers. They will buy the flashy foreign imports or local copies because they can’t afford the true luxury cars. It might be the top rap artist, the top movie actor, the top sports star they are trying to copy, not the businessman. This group suffers from low self esteem, needs peer approval, is usually under 30 years old, frequently not financially stable, but will spend whatever money they have on anything that will make them look like their ideal: successful. If you want to talk to Emulators, you need to make sure that whatever you are trying to sell them will make them seem just like the person they are emulating: the successful Achiever.
Socially Conscious Type A
The Socially Conscious psychographic group comes in two types, A and B. Type A is about 25% of the population and Type B is about 7%. This group is concerned with the effects their actions have on society as a whole. They want to make the world a better place. They are environmentally concerned, they recycle, they buy things that are environmentally friendly, and drive fuel-efficient cars. They believe in schooling and teaching children, and are frequently highly educated, mostly in the liberal arts. They like to help the homeless and the poor, the socially disadvantaged. But they are quite cynical about society and its flaws, yet take a generally positive view of how the future could be. You must sell something that is making a difference to either society or the environment. Being educated, these people can quickly see through fake environmentalism and social conscience.
Socially Conscious Type B
Very much like their cousins in Type A, most of the generalizations of Type A will apply to Type B, except for where Type A believes that there is hope for humanity as a whole, Type B has given up on humanity as a whole, and has moved off into their own small communities where they live socially conscious within their socially conscious group. One can find these little islands spread all around the country, not only in the hippie communes in California, but also those that have sequestered themselves away in the hills of Montana, religious communities in Texas, and communes that can be found all over the world that don’t believe in personal property. These people are mostly self sufficient, and purposely cut themselves off from the world, so they are unlikely to be open to offerings.
Balanced/Totally Integrated
Persons in the Balanced category are the smallest of all the groups, accounting for only 1-2% of the population. The Balanced group is basically a mixture of the Achiever and Socially Conscious types. Basically, these are Achievers with a Social Conscience. There are many examples of people who have grown rich, who have achieved power and wealth, but still ensure that their rewards don’t come at the expense of society, but rather with the cooperation and to the benefit of humanity and nature as a whole. For the most part, they are too busy to listen to you unless you have something to offer them. They will do their research before seeing you, or have staff to do so.
Needs Driven
Finally, we end with the needs driven individuals, accounting for about 15% of the population. These are people who buy on impulse and instinct, depending on what they need at the time. Even if on a budget, they will often pay more because, instead of doing the weekly shopping trip to the supermarket where things are cheaper, they will buy things last minute at the corner store. Another curious thing about this group is that they will frequently flash money around. In this way, there is a bit of emulator there, but they are not trying to emulate anyone in particular, they only want to prove that they have money.
On the leading edge of brain science. When a particular marketing challenge warrants it, we also use a number of leading edge technologies in the field of neurology. This brain science—or as some say—neuromarketing, when combined with our other data, allows us to confirm our confidence in strategic recommendations by knowing your customers’ minds—literally.
Once we have determined the demographic and psychographic segmentation of your target audiences, we look at sociographic variables to fine-tune our understanding of your customers, establish hyper-relevant marketing, and optimize our communication with them.
In today’s market, it is no longer good enough to plan and execute marketing communications based simply on broad age and era similarities in beliefs, values and expectations. We have to dig deeper to define meaningful market segmentations.
