Psychographic Segmentations: From Soul to Pocket

Have you ever tried to build an advertising strategy for a product or brand? At first glance, it seems like a simple task. The product is given. Its properties, production cost, distribution possibilities, and the marketing goals of the manufacturer determine its potential buyers (target group). All you need to do is find a promise that convinces potential buyers.

Fot: Paweł L.: https://www.pexels.com/pl-pl/zdjecie/fotografia-ludzi-w-skali-szarosci-1245055/

How to Create a Marketing Strategy?

The promise must meet three requirements: be related to the product, meet the needs of the buyers, and effectively distinguish our product from the competition. This traditional recipe for a good strategy doesn’t always work.

For example, sometimes our product has no practical user advantage that distinguishes it from the competition. This is the grim reality for manufacturers of beer, cigarettes, cooking oil, and washing powder.

The product doesn’t help! Inspiration for finding a promise must be sought elsewhere; otherwise, we will end up in a circle of promises that don’t differentiate us from the competition, and the fight will be, at best, a media battle of strength.

Without finding inspiration in the product, we turn to potential buyers, and here we encounter more difficulties. The first, very common one appears when the producer-advertiser wants to sell their product to many, ideally everyone.

Difficulties in Identifying the Target Group and Segmentation

How to base a distinguishing promise on the need of everyone? It’s a difficult matter; however, it can get even worse – it happens that the distinguishing feature of the target group not only doesn’t help but even maliciously hinders the preparation of the right strategy.

A good example of such a blind alley is the puzzle that specialists had to solve a few years ago when introducing two first, functionally equivalent, mobile telephony systems in Poland. Given the fairly high price of the service, the main feature of potential buyers was their lack of wealth.

Income analyses clearly showed that the advertising promise should be directed at those who could afford GSM, i.e., the top fraction of a percent of the population, amounting to maybe a hundred thousand people.

If we had known then (I’m talking about myself – I poorly advised Era) that there would be over twenty times as many subscribers! Beer or mobile telephony is nothing compared to the trap set for strategists by pension funds. A product equalised by law.

Functionally, of course, intended for the elderly. This year sold to people (on average) approaching forty. But how to set its promise when in all the following years it will be bought by the youth?

The examples I have given are united by the fact that the lack of strategic support in the functional features of the product is not compensated by the description of the target group. Neither helps in formulating a promise that distinguishes from the competition.

How to Define the Target Group?

There is little that can be done with the product itself. Besides, a poor strategist would be the one whose advice in the face of initial difficulties would boil down to suggesting throwing it in the bin and create something else, easier to communicate.

But I assure you, something can be done with defining the target group! The traditional way of describing the target group is their demographic characteristics: age, gender, place of residence, income, and education. Its main advantage is comprehensibility – we all understand what “men aged 20–45, living in the city, with higher education and above-average earnings” means.

However, the fact that this description is understandable does not translate into its usefulness. A useful group from a communication perspective must be internally cohesive in terms of its members’ needs. This is precisely why, by referring to a given need, we know that we are addressing all members of this group, not just a part of them.

However, demographically defined groups do not have needs common to all members. To be sure that we are reaching them, we would have to bombard them with a whole set of promises; however, this cannot be done because it is known that in advertising only simple, decisive messages are effective.

Therefore, demographically defined target groups resemble our economic regulations: perhaps with righteous intentions, but practically unusable. To overcome this difficulty, many strategic firms (as well as research firms of advertising agencies) propose consumer divisions into groups that are assumed to have common sets of needs and are internally homogeneous, i.e., their features are strongly correlated. These divisions are called “psychographic segmentations.”

Modern Approach – Psychographic Segmentation

They differ from similar segmentations (“typologies”) used in psychology in that they assume the distinction of groups whose needs translate into consumer behaviours, not, for example, the most common defence mechanisms or social adaptation.

The TGS (Target Group Segmentation ® Stratosfera and SMG/KRC) psychographic segmentation, which I use daily, divides consumers into six main groups. I would like to describe them without introducing you to its theoretical nuances (which I am very eager to do, but will temporarily restrain myself).

Who are the so-called Embittered?

The order of describing the types is dictated solely by the convenience of description. The first consumer type is the so-called Embittered. These are generally older and less active people. They feel they have lost their life opportunities and have a mostly pessimistic view of the future.

They are focused on their own, individual safety. They achieve this by stubbornly adhering to traditional, proven beliefs and principles and avoiding novelties.

Furthermore, they do not represent a high purchasing power as a group and are challenging to persuade to new products, which makes them a large but unattractive group for advertisers.

Polish brands for the embittered include, for example, Polopiryna, “Mleczna” margarine, Radio Maryja, and ZUS. The next type, the largest in almost every country, is the Conformists. These are mostly married couples with children aged 30–40.

Who are the Conformists?

Their main characteristic is following the majority or (if you prefer) reluctance to stand out, which they consider dangerous. Their views are non-controversial, their habits and way of life “average”; they like domestic products and the most well-known brands.

Due to their large number, they are very often the target of advertising activities. Perhaps even too typically, as they are hard to win over: they must be convinced that a brand is truly well-known and thus a safe choice.

As you can guess, this directly translates into the size of advertising budgets. This is one reason why effective margarine or washing powder campaigns, typical products for Conformists, must be so massive in the media: they need to be convinced that a brand is popular!

In Poland, brands for Conformists include Bona, PKO, Hortex, and Poradnik Domowy. Conformists and the embittered are very similar types in many respects: they crave security, and their behaviours focus on defending against changes and avoiding risky novelties.

Psychographic Segmentation – Other Types

The other four types differ fundamentally from them. Striving for change and novelty is their element. The third type in the TGS segmentation is the Seekers. If I were to list the segments chronologically, this would be the first type. Seekers are generally young people. They do not yet have a fully established personality, life plans, or tastes.

Their main motive is precisely the attempt to find out whom they “really” are. They realise this through the pursuit of strong experiences and activities (including consumption activities) that manifest their individuality.

They love novelties because having them distinguishes them more than already known things. As consumers, they may not have much purchasing power, but due to their way of acquiring goods – impulsive and experimental – they are excellent for initially introducing novelties to the market.

They do not require large media budgets. They are the ideal consumers for snacks and small packaged drinks. Polish brands especially for Seekers include Frugo;s drinks, Machina’s magazine, and Black Jack bar.

Targeting Seekers requires great caution, as it is a segment that can most easily be convinced by arguments unacceptable to the remaining five, as the {ego} pension fund currently feels.

Reformers, the fourth type, are less associated with a specific age group. They are people with strong, individualistic views, which they are eager to manifest and try to impose on others. They often exhibit a moralistic and didactic streak. Not only that, but they want the world to be better, cleaner, and more (according to their standards) just.

This attitude determines their consumption: they buy goods that, in their opinion, directly or indirectly contribute to improving the world.

Psychographic Segmentation and Consumer Groups

Besides items directly related to gaining knowledge or ecology, they can be persuaded to a tied sale where an “ordinary” product is accompanied by a promise of world improvement. The British company The Body Shop successfully used this method, advertising its cosmetics in the past as “not tested on animals.”

Now that this promise no longer distinguishes in the cosmetics industry, The Body Shop is involved in defending the freedom of oppressed African tribes. Another well-known company for Seekers is the American Patagonia. The sportswear they produce has a label indicating that part of its very high price goes to protect tropical forests.

Reformers are a group difficult to win over and programmatically limiting consumption, so there are not many brands and advertising campaigns specifically for them.

Seekers and Reformers share the fact that the changes they desire and strive for are of a psychological or moral nature, not material. The last two types, also open to change, understand it in the most material terms, i.e., the state of possession.

The fifth TGS type is the Chaotic. They are people who very much want to improve their overall life situation and wealth in particular but do not believe that they can achieve this by following any long-term, systematic plan. This includes gaining higher qualifications or climbing the career ladder.

They realise the motivation to improve their condition in the ways left to them: short periods of increased activity, operating on the edge of the law, gambling, or alcohol or drug escape.

From a marketing perspective, they are an attractive group mainly due to their number, as they do not represent high purchasing power and are generally disloyal to the brands they use. The easiest way to win them over is through promotions. In Poland, they are an obvious target group for Lotto, Teleaudio, or “Łzy Sołtysa” fruit wine. The last TGS type should bring a smile of satisfaction to any marketing specialist.

Aspiring people are mostly young (but not as young as Seekers) individuals for whom life success translates into a high social and professional position, documented by their possessions. For this reason, their consumption patterns are very attractive to marketers: they buy to show off, so they buy a lot and choose things that emphasise their financial status.

It was precisely the Aspirants segment, exceptionally strong in Poland a few years ago, that caused a completely unjustified by income boom in mobile phones – an available alternative to another status good, the car.

Without knowing about the existence and size of the Aspirants segment, it was extremely difficult to predict this boom, as our marketing intuitions are automatically and quite rightly tuned to the largest group, the Conformists, for whom the price of the product is one of the central decision-making premises.

Aspirants are not particularly loyal to brands, but they eagerly buy novelties (as you have already noticed, these two features usually go hand in hand). Brands particularly attractive to Polish Aspirants came from the West. Examples include Honda, Citibank, Elle, or Nokia.

Polish School of Psychographic Segmentation

The TGS segmentation is similar to other known market tools in the West, such as VALS (® SRI Consulting) or its derivative 4C (® Y&R). The similarity comes from both “ontological” reasons (the market economy tends to produce just such consumer segments) and similar methodology.

This methodology, most often based on Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” (1954) or Lynn Kahle’s “list of values” (1983), assumes the existence of a few culturally universal, partially mutually exclusive central life motives.

Thanks to the similarity of TGS to standard Western segmentations, we can inquire about what are the “specifically Polish” elements of general psychographic types.

For example, Polish Embittered (Strugglers, Resigned Poor) are more negative and aggressive than in the West; our Conformists (Mainstream, Believers) have lower average earnings, and Aspirants (Achievers) place more importance on the appearance of prosperity than actual earnings, etc. Furthermore, the quantitative structure of groups in Poland differs from what we see, for example, in wealthy Western European countries – it is more similar to, for example, Mexican or Portuguese.

Psychographic segmentations are among the most expensive tools used in building advertising strategies. The reason for this is the laborious and costly process of building the tool. Segmentation cannot simply be “detected”: it must be constantly researched to determine its stability and long-term trends.

Preparing the pilot version of TGS took over a year. Nearly forty thousand people were surveyed in several waves, hundreds of questions were added and removed from the tool, and as many as two companies – research and strategic – participated in the work.

But this effort pays off. Ladies and Gentlemen! I am convinced that without segmentation data and psychographic definition of target groups, building an effective, non-obvious strategy (in developed market economies, all new, effective strategies are necessarily non-obvious!) is practically impossible.

The text comes from 1999 and originally appeared in Marketing Serwis and was reprinted in One Way Mirror.