Psychographic segmentation

Psychographic segmentation categorizes people by their interests, personalities, opinions, attitudes, and lifestyles. It aims to understand how these variables influence consumer behavior.

Unlike behavioral segmentation, which focuses on actions, psychographic segmentation is about understanding consumers’ mindsets. It’s the key to understanding your customers and why they behave the way they do.

Psychographic segmentation is an insights-driven approach that lets you understand:

• customer pain points
• customer value
• what drives different consumer behavior

Brands use psychographic segmentation to create personalized marketing strategies and as market research when designing products and services. For instance, if you're designing a bike helmet, consider whether your target audience is more motivated to buy something flashy and stylish, focused on safety, or both.

How do industry leaders segment their audience for personalization? Find out in our report on industry segmentation patterns.

The most common factors used to create psychographic segments are:

Lifestyles

Lifestyle is the clearest indication of what someone genuinely values or how they spend their time and money. To get a clear picture of this, companies need to examine people's activities, interests, and opinions.

Activities - What, how, and why people are doing the activities they enjoy.

Interests - Level of excitement people get from engaging with something.

Opinions - Thoughts on religion, gender, politics, environment, cultural topics, etc.

Values

Values refer to the things that are important to someone and guide their decisions and behavior. For example, someone who values family may be more likely to purchase products designed to make life easier for parents or children.

Attitudes

Attitudes are a person's beliefs or opinions about something. For instance, someone who has a positive attitude towards fitness is more likely to buy health-related products than someone who does not share that attitude.

Personality traits

Personality traits provide insight into how a person is likely to react in certain situations. For instance, an introvert is more likely to be interested in a one-on-one meeting than a networking event. You can segment people based on individual personality traits or use common personality types.

Social class

Social classes range from consumers with the least buying power (bottom lower class) to those with the most buying power (top upper class). Social class helps companies predict a customer’s willingness and ability to pay for a product.

Psychographic segmentation provides deeper insights into buyer personas and what motivates them. It helps brands create stronger, more personalized marketing messages that resonate with customers. The benefits of psychographics include:

• A deeper understanding of your customers: Psychographic data provides valuable insights into customer pain points, needs, wants, concerns, values, motivations, and aspirations. It can also help businesses understand how and why customers use their products or services.

• More targeted marketing: Creating distinct psychographic segments enables marketing teams to deliver personalized experiences that align with people's values, interests, and activities, strengthening their connection with your brand.

• The ability to appeal to customers’ emotions: Most people make decisions on an emotional level. Psychographic segmentation helps brands form that emotional connection and increase engagement.

Psychographic segmentation helps brands better understand their customers and what motivates them, but it can be more challenging to implement than other types of segmentation.

Setup process: Psychographic data is harder to obtain than other types of segmentation data. It requires surveys, interviews, and focus groups.

Complex to analyze: Psychographic data is more subjective than other data types, which can lead to false assumptions that a particular factor influences buyer behavior.

Costly: Getting actionable insights from psychographic segmentation requires quantitative and qualitative market research approaches, which can be expensive.

To get accurate, reliable psychographic data, you will need to use multiple sources.

These typically include:

Surveys

When conducting surveys, use clear, concise questions, consider how you will analyze the data, and allow participants to remain anonymous, encouraging them to be honest.

Interviews

You can conduct interviews in person, over the phone, or via email. Choose a method that allows the interviewer to build rapport with the respondent. The interviewer should ask probing questions and encourage respondents to elaborate on their answers.

Focus groups

Focus groups are a good way to collect psychographic data from a group of people. The moderator should ask open-ended questions and encourage discussion.

Digital actions

Past actions, preferences, and patterns on digital channels can be analyzed and understood using various tools.

It’s important to obtain consent, protect customers' privacy, and use psychographic data responsibly.

See how easy it is to set up segments and start delivering personalized experiences with AI-native personalization, or contact us to see how Contentful can help your business scale personalization faster.