PsychographicsRevisited: The Birth

of a TechniqueBy Emanuel H. Demby

The term "psychographics" can be traced back to World War I, when it wasused to describe people by their looks. Since then, it has evolved, albeit cir-cuitously, into an important segmentation tool that still has underdevelopedapplications, especially in the area of low-cost media studies. The author, oneof the pioneers in psychographic research, relates the fascinating historybehind the method in this article reprinted from the Jan. 2, 1989, issue ofMarketing News.

2 6 Vol. 6 No. 2

Psyehographics has many fathers (includ-ing me), and all of them seem to have avahd reason for claiming to first devel-op it or be better at it than anyone else.Although there may be ,some argument

about who was first, the truth is that everyone in psy-chographics (even those who call it lifestyle researchor values research) is probably correct in advocatinga "tight" way to do psychographic research.

Their methodologies are different, but allresearchers are trying to go beyond the demo-graphics to quantitatively improve on past researchfor decision making when demographics are foundnot to be enough.

As far as I know, I did the first publicly avail-able study of psychographics in 1965, and madeup the name at the spur of the moment. I was ata Detroit ad agency with Jack Connors, thenpublisher of Holiday magazine and later publish-er of Travel & Leisure, explaining the research Iwas about to do. The vice pre.sident we were vis-iting asked, "What do you call what you'reattempting to do?" My spontaneous reply was,"Psychographics!"

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(As far as 1 knew then, psychographics was aword I had suddenly made up. Many years laterI found the word had a history. It was used in"Grey Matter," a newsletter published by GreyAdvertising in New York.)

I would define psychographics as: "The use ofpsychological, sociological, and anthropologicalfactors, such as benefits desired (from the behaviorbeing studied), self-concept, and lifestyle (or serv-ing style) to determine how the market is segment-ed by the propensity of groups within the market—and their reasons—to make a particular decisionabout a product, person, ideology, or otherwisehold an attitude or use a medium. Demographicsand socioeconomics also are used as a constantcheck to see if psychographic market segmentationimproves on other forms of segmentation, includ-ing user/nonuser groupings."

COINED DURING W W IMy research into the word "psychographics"

indicates it was first used by an American writeraround World War I to describe a method of clas-sifying people by their physical appearance, but

not by demographics, socioeconomics, lifestyle, orpsychological characteristics.

It was later used during the 1920s to describe atechnique for classifying people by certain atti-tudes. Still, no attempt was made to research thishypothesis or suggest the existence of segments.Someone else used the same word during the1930s to portray a mystical study of human nature.

These seemingly contradictory definitions hadone thing in common: They sensed there could bea psychological profile of a population. Allseemed to lack what is known as a good dependentvariable for measurement—howclose or how far each psycho-graphic group was to a particularbehavior or attitude.

When 1 first accidentally usedthe word, I was just combining twocommon words, psychology anddemographics. Psychographics isan attempt to move away from ear-lier views of people expressedmainly in behavioral, demograph-ic, and socioeconomic measures.Psychographics allows us to viewa population as individuals withfeelings and tendencies, addressedin compatible groups (segments) to make mote effi-cient use both of mass media and those that are target-ed to particular portions of the population.

Not until 1967 was there a standard quantitativeway of getting qualitative data about people. Acomputer clustering program made it possible topredict the chances of selling a product or an idea toa segment, and which medium is more likely to pro-vide an aid to what we were trying to accomplish.

Credit for helping us to develop suitable projec-tive devices must be given to a former associate ofmine, psychologist Ernest Dichter. He did a greatdeal of the early work of putting psychological,sociological, and anthropological concepts intoeasily administered projective tests.

LARGE SAMPEESThe importance of being able to use large sam-

ples, which is a feature of psychographics, is thatthe .study of a total population could finally be donewith samples projectible to millions. Once we usedto consider a sample of 100 quite large in a depthinterview or focus group. With psychographics, wecould finally use probability samples of about1,200 to build marketing segments of the total pop-ulation—and get media habits by each segment'stendency lo hold attitudes or behave a certainway—and the reasons for this.

This achievement had great importance becausewe could now profile media, as well as products, bytheir psychographic segments. A new development

Not until 1967was there a

standardquantitative way

of gettingqualitative dataabout people.

allows us to determine how a medium may influencethe psychographic profile of its audience: in effect,doing a psychographic study of a medium and com-petition without the sizable expenditures normallyassociated with a major psychographics study.

My experience with what finally came to beknown as p.sychographics goes back to 1948.While working with Dichter. I first thought of theusefulness of a segmentation technique that wouldcluster people by their tendency to think or act in acertain way.

Though he didn't use the word psychographicsto describe his work, DanYankelovich developed usefulsegments of watch buyers in themiddle 1960s and wrote aboutthis in the Harvatd BusinessReview. This has to be consid-ered one of the precursors ofpsychographics, as were studiesin the early "60s about con-sumers' responses to productbenefits by Russ Haley andShirley Young for Grey Adver-tising.

MEANINGFUL NUMBERSMy original concept was that learning whether

the finding that a person earned a particular salary,say S25,000 per year, could be made more mean-ingful if we knew if that person had been earning$50,000 and was reduced to $25,000: if the indi-vidual had just been given a raise to $25,000; or ifthe person had been making $25,000 per year for along time.

Depending on which situation applied, an indi-vidual's reaction to products, communications, andeven choice of media ought lo be different, and thisvariable could be used for building segments,Everybody I spoke to agreed with the possiblevalue of this concept, but nobody would investmoney in it.

As we entered the computer age, it became pos-sible to handle much larger amounts of informa-tion about people, and 1 got "fancier." Not only didincome status concem me, but also the individu-aFs level of expectation: aspirations about suchthings as product desires, political and personalgoals, etc.

This also aroused a great deal of interest, butresulted in no money. In fact, for many years, thepublisher of Time had me make presentations ofthe idea to him, one year even having me compilemake-believe data to show what such a study mightreveal and its possible importance to media. Thisalso didn't sell.

Meanwhile, I did studies throughout Europe forCaltex gasoline (a marketing combination of Socal

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The longvoyage from an

idea to aresearch projecttook me from1948 to 1965.

and Texaco worldwide), and for several divisionsof Chesebrough Pond, Alka Seltzer, and IBM.These studies gave me an opportunity to experi-

ment with attitudinal questionsthat would later be incorporatedinto psychographics.

Suggestions from two of mythen-employees, Louis Cohen andLarry Wolf, turned me in direc-tions that worked ultimately byusing variables (questions) withwhich advertisers, agencies, andmedia were familiar: what peopleactually bought, where (and if)they traveled, vacation habits,party and dinner customs, bever-

age consutnption, product benefits sought, lifestyleand serving style and self-concept, media habits,and projective tests that revealed whether respon-dents were "appreciative" or "thankful" towardothers.

MISSING LINKI built segments with three classes of variables—

responses about lifestyle (or serving style), self-con-cept, and benefits sought. The.se seemed most toreflect what groups of people had in common. Thesepredicted, quite accurately, who were and were notearly new-product buyers. This was one of thedependent variables that earlierattempts to profile people didnot have.

The first study was spon-sored by Time, using depthinterviews. This research ledto presentations at the annualWorld Association of PublicOpinion Researeb (WAPOR)conference in Williamstown,Mass., and the Dublin (Ire-land) conference of WAPORin 1965 and 1966, respective-ly, and to a presentation to theAMA's New York Chapterlater in 1966. My paperswere titled "Beyond the De-mographics."

The long voyage from anidea to a research project tookme from 1948 to 1965, with aquantitative investigation sponsored by Holidaymagazine, using segmentation questions founduseful in the qualitative work.

Interestingly, when I held demographics andsocioeconomics constant, great differences in atti-tude and behavior existed that could not be learnedin the usual media studies. Using a two-segmentmodel of consumers (creative and passive to rep-

With myEuropean affiliates,

I acted as aJohnny Appleseed,planting the seedsof psychographics

research in theUnited Kingdom,France, Italy, and

Germany.

resent, respectively, those who did and did not buylifestyle-changing new products), I found thatthere were important differences even in suchdemographically and socioeconomically similarmedia audiences as Time and Newsweek. Therewere more creative consumers (early new-productpurchasers) in the Time audience than in theNewsweek audience.

Probably the most important technologicaladvance in the first 20 years that led to the develop-ment of psychographics was the computer. Simul-taneous use of three different classes of variables toconstruct segments is accomplished by a clusteringprogram, something that couldn't be done beforehigh-speed computers. For psychographics, I preferthe Q clustering program, actually an inverse factoranalysis, to fonn segments. My preference for Q isthat it shows, much more than other methods, whatcontributed to segment formation.

The second most itnportant advance is the use ofwhat can best be called "special profile infonnation"to form psychographic groups. One set was devel-oped by Douglas Tigert of the University of Torontoin the 1970s. It involved what he called AIO: atti-tude (and activities), interests, and opinions.

HISTORICAL PARENTSEor me, the historical parents of psychograph-

ics, before it was even called that, were PaulLazerfeld and his associatesduring the 1950s at Colum-bia University's Bureau ofApplied Statistics. He sug-gested that any researchaimed at understanding con-sumer behavior must "in-volve an interplay amongthree sets of variables; predis-position, influences, and pro-duct attributes."

By 1967, I felt stronglythat a good psychographicsstudy had to be tailored toilluminate a particular prob-lem the researcher was try-ing to solve. The Time andHoliday studies were de-signed to separate the popula-tion into two segments: onethat would be first in new-

product purchasing and another segment of lateradopters.

With my European affiliates, I acted as aJohnny Appleseed. planting the seeds of psycho-graphics research in the United Kingdom, France(where my surprised affiliate told me. "Itworks!"). Italy, and Germany.

In recent years, the Stanford Research Institute

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has jumped on the bandwagon through its VALSmethod, using values as the segment discriminator.Many years earlier, a noted sociologist, MiltonRodeach. also promoted the use of value segmenta-tion and presented a paper on values at the Dublinconference of WAPOR in the middle 1960s.

The area where there is still a great deal of workto be done is media segmentation: going beyondbehavioral measures to learn which competingmedia are favored by psychographically qualifiedrespondents in a particular segment.

A new psychographics technique for mediainvolves content analyses of competing media,using pragmatic, psychological, sociological, andanthropological criteria. Q analysis is used, and theresult is a segmentation of media from which onecan predict potential audience size and their quali-ties and indicate which media are likely to be mosteffective. One advantage is that it costs only a frac-tion of other psychographic studies.

In a study by Vending Times magazine, I used asthe criteria that determined the psychographics ofcompeting magazines how each catered pragmati-cally to vending machine operators. The magazine

with the lowest ranking vending psychographicsalso had the fewest vending articles—and ihefewest readers.

The magazine with the highest number of vend-ing articles had the best vending psychographics. Toaccount for the influence of these psychographics onreadership, I developed the "ratio of differences/'through percentages of differences, between com-peting magazines. Of course, this is an early andquite crude magazine psychographics technique.Later work will allow me to refine the method.

We are still at the dawn of the new day whenmedia will be analyzed not just for demographicsand socioeconomics. but also for audience atti-tudes. Using pragmatic, psycboiogical, sociologi-cal, and anthropological measures in content analy-ses, we should provide psychographics tnedia pro-files to help media buyers.

This is not to say that the current state-of-the-art of psychographics has not been a powerful aidto the most efficient selection of media, it hasbeen. It's just that we have a great deal more dis-tance to travel to accomplish low-cost psycho-graphics for media,luiij

Emanuel H. Dembyciirreijlly resides inRepo Park, N.Y.

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