home Marketing Basics of Marketing - Kotler Philip

Basics of Marketing - Kotler Philip

SEGMENTATION BY PSYCHOGRAPHIC PRINCIPLE

In the psychographic segmentation of buyers are divided into groups based on membership in the social class, lifestyle and / or personality characteristics. Representatives of the same demographic group may have completely different psychographic profiles.

The social class. In Ch. 5 we gave a description of six US social classes and noted that belonging to one of them strongly affects the person's preferences for cars, clothes, household accessories, leisure, his reading habits, the choice of retail outlets, etc. Many firms Project their goods and / or services in terms of representatives of a particular social class, including the inclusion of properties and characteristics that they are impressed by it.

Lifestyle. In the same chapter, we have already noted that the way of life influences people's interest in certain goods. Vendors of branded and conventional goods are increasingly resorting to segmenting markets on the basis of consumers' lifestyle. For example, the jeans manufacturer wanted to create jeans for one of a specific group of men, such as "active getters," self-indulgent lovers of pleasure, "traditional" home-siters, non-observances from workers, "business leaders" or successful "traditionalists." For each of these groups, jeans of special cut will be needed, at different prices, offered with the help of different advertising texts, through different trading enterprises, etc. And if the firm does not announce, to representatives of what kind of life the product is intended, its jeans may not cause any special interest in any group of men.

Type of personality. Variable personality characteristics are also used by sellers as a basis for segmenting the market. Manufacturers give their goods personal characteristics that correspond to the personal characteristics of consumers. In the late 50's, cars "Ford" and "Chevrolet" were advertised as machines for people of different types. It was assumed that the Ford customers are people "independent, impulsive, courageous, sensitive to change and self-assured, and the owners of Chevrolet are conservative, economical, caring about prestige, less courageous and trying to avoid extremes" 5. Investigator Franklin Evans decided to test the validity of his views by subjecting the owners of Ford and Chevrolet to the usual test for determining the type of person, during which they measured the needs of these individuals in pursuit of success, achievement of influence, change, aggressiveness, etc. Not Considering a slight superiority on the basis of achieving influence, the results of the assessments of Ford's owners differed little from the results of Chevrolet owners' assessments. Evans came to the conclusion that the coincidence of evaluation results makes it practically impossible to divide the audience by personality types. Differences in types of personality are sometimes found in a number of later studies. Ralf Vestfoll has found evidence in favor of the differences in the personality types of owners of convertible cars and a rigid roof. According to him, the first seem to people more active, impulsive and sociable b. Shirley Young, the director of the research service of one of the leading advertising agencies, announced the creation of a method for successfully segmenting the market based on the nature of the audience in relation to such categories of products as women's cosmetics, cigarettes, insurance and spirits. R. Ekoff and J. Emshoff managed to identify four types of personality of beer consumers (see Table 11) and help "Anheuser-Bush" develop a specific advertising campaign to cover each of these groups8.

Table 11

Segmentation of beer consumers by type of personality