Why Psychographic Segmentation takes campaigns to the next level
By Laura Weston, Audience Research Team. Top image: Chris Imlay
Demographic data is not enough. We need to understand the motivations of the human beings behind the numbers, and that takes psychographics
As marketers, we're obsessed with understanding our customers. After all, the promise of deep insight is that it enables us to deliver targeted campaigns that truly speak to our audiences.
For decades, demographic segmentation has been the quick and dirty (not to mention cheap) method for slicing and dicing our marketplace.
But demographic data like age, gender, income, and location has a fatal flaw. It often falls short of capturing the nuances underpinning consumer behavior.
For instance, two individuals with a similar demographic profile can have vastly different purchasing habits and brand loyalties:
Dependence on demographics belongs to an era when people of a certain age, income, and gender conformed to type. But that time has passed as society liberalized, career choices proliferated, and lifestyle options increased.
While demographics provide a partial view of ‘who’ might buy your product, psychographics can tell you ‘why’ they might buy it.
This is the key advantage of psychographic segmentation. It’s a method of grouping consumers according to their shared behaviors, motivations, values, and interests.
And by providing a deeper understanding of your audience’s personality traits, psychographics enable you to craft more personalized campaigns that connect to your consumers’ emotional drivers.
The power of why
In the context of videogames, traditional demographic segmentation might target males aged 18-35. However, within this group, psychographic segmentation can identify subgroups such as:
Performance-driven gamers who love the thrill of competition.
Connection-driven gamers who prioritize playing with friends and family.
Creativity-driven gamers who may be streamers or into UGC.
Immersion-driven gamers who enjoy exploring or creating in-game alter egos.
Time-driven gamers who are simply killing time and want to enjoy some instant escapism.
But psychographics can take you deeper still. Unpeel the onion layers of the performance-driven segment and you can unveil cohorts that are:
Status-driven gloaters who delight in showing off.
Glory hunters who care about being the best and topping the rankings.
Aspirational pros who prize making a living from gaming.
Chaos lovers who revel in mayhem and destruction.
With psychographic insights in hand, you can develop messaging and assets that directly tie into each group's underlying motivations.
For example, glory hunters respond well to stats, gameplay feature sets, and the sense that they are an underdog who can defy the odds.
Meanwhile, chaos lovers respond to assets that show destruction and chaos, funny memes (featuring chaos), and the chance to play by their own rules (i.e. there’ll be ample opportunity to sow chaos).
Psychographics can similarly enable you to select the right influencers to partner with.
Just as campaign assets are more effective when correctly aligned with your audience’s emotional touchpoints, so are influencers.
Happily, enlisting multiple creators needn’t bust the budget as lower cost micro- and nano-influencers typically score higher for engagement, conversion, and credibility than top-dollar mega-stars.
How psychographic segmentation works
The raw material of psychographics includes market-specific surveys that gather qualitative data on customers’:
Personal attitudes: personality traits, lifestyle, interests, hobbies, and personal values.
Market / brand / product attitudes: Product ownership, preferences, needs and usage. Brand perception and loyalty. Purchase behavior, motivations, drivers and barriers. Price sensitivity.
Channel preferences: social, online, offline, purchase channels.
Additionally, you can enrich your psychographic picture with social listening data, existing campaign data, audience planning data, consumer feedback, and good old demographics, too.
Our proprietary psychographic segmentation model incorporates all of those sources but breaks new ground by using machine learning to apply the output to larger CRM databases. That enables us to track each segment’s digital footprint on a larger scale, yielding additional signals that sharpen our audience profiles.
Ethnographics takes it to the next level
For deeper, contextual insights into consumer behavior, our Research & Data team layers in ethnographic data.
Ethnographic research helps marketers observe and understand how consumers interact with products in a natural setting such as the home.
A classic example of an ethnographic study is a consumer tech company discovering that customers struggle with the complexity of a product’s set-up process. The brand then uses that realization to develop a more user-friendly solution.
In an ethnographic study of gaming streamers, we found that the role of a USB mic in a creator’s life was as emotive as a tennis player’s favorite racket or a runner’s trusted brand of shoes. A streamer’s mic was actually a confidence-boosting enabler that helped them function as creatives.
This insight revealed that our client’s product campaigns should lead with emotional messages rather than product features. In fact we found that highlighting only one product benefit was actually more powerful than overwhelming consumers with a volley of USPs.
Key takeaway
In a marketplace where consumer preferences are continually evolving, both demographic and psychographic inputs are valuable pieces of a comprehensive segmentation model.
But it’s the deeper human truths uncovered by psychographics that enable you to avoid blasting out generic messaging.
This is particularly critical in the videogame sector where brands must reach fragmented audiences that demand authenticity.
By aligning with the behaviors, values, and motivations of your segments you can create a brand narrative that feels personalized to them.
When executed with creative skill, that approach will enable you to find your authentic voice and create targeted campaigns that cut-through, engage, and convert.
Taking it further
We’re creating the videogames industry’s most powerful psychographic segmentation model by incorporating ethnographic research of unprecedented depth, and scaling our results using large scale datasets.
Meanwhile, our Creative team are experts at transforming psychographic data into high-impact campaigns that resonate with gamers and prompt action. Drop us a line to discuss the possibilities.
If you would like to discover more about our integrated approach and work together on a project, get in touch.
