Psychographics is a system for measuring consumers’ beliefs, opinions and interests. It’s like demographics but instead of counting age, gender, race, etc., it counts psychological information (opinions on abortion, religious beliefs, music tastes, personality traits, etc.) Marketing research usually combines demographic and psychographic information.

Psychographics is an important and often little understood area of market research. Over the last thirty years interest in personality-based approaches to consumer behaviour – understanding how consumers of particular products can be divided into types or classes – has grown considerably. Better research designs, more appropriate measures and more realistic expectations have led to results that shed new light on consumer choice and are directly applicable in marketing management and research. Based on a comprehensive review of the available literature in psychology and marketing research, this handbook attempts to explain thoroughly the techniques used in psychographics and how they are applied in marketing.

Psychographics are terms that describe the psychological characteristics of the segments of the population as defined by demographics. Psychographics are primarily attitudes and values that define and influence lifestyles and purchasing patterns. Understanding the underlying motivations of how and why particular people make their purchases helps to create customer profiles.

Psychographics alone, though, are usually not sufficient: many marketing issues, such as determining what market to target or planning a media mix, require demographic data. However, decisions about such issues tend to be more effective if the demographic data can be linked back to psychographic data. Therefore, it’s often useful to first identify the psychographic characteristics of the target market(s), and then to determine the relative prevalence of the characteristics among different demographic groups.