In the field of marketing, demographics, opinion research, and social research in general, psychographic variables are any attributes relating to personality, values, attitudes, interests, or lifestyles. They are also called IAO variables (for Interests, Attitudes, and Opinions). They can be contrasted with demographic variables (such as age and gender), and behavioral variables (such as usage rate or loyalty).

When a relatively complete assessment of a person or group's psychographic make-up is constructed, this is called a psychographic profile. Psychographic profiles are used in market segmentation and advertising.

Some categories of psychographic factors used in market segmentation include:

• Social class
• Lifestyle
• Behavior

In business, "lifestyles" provide a means of targeting consumers as advertisers and marketers endeavor to match consumer aspirations with products. Lifestyles refer to patterns in which people live, spend time and money. These patterns reflect by demographical factors (the habits, attitudes, tastes, moral standards, economic level and so on) that together constitute the mode of living of an individual or group); that include things such as the individual’s activities in addition to their interests. As a construct that helps consumers interact with their worlds, lifestyles are a subject to change every time. Consumer behaviour research uses lifestyle data to determine which consumers by products.

Past research.

The product class of interest was the retail banking market in which was dominated by 6 banks. Each respondents sought benefits were measured by ratings of the importance of 17 attributes associated with banks. Subjects were asked: “When choosing a bank with which to business, how important the following attributes:

1. large
2. wide variety of services
3. good advertising
4. conveniently located branches
5. good reputation in your community
6. high interest on savings
7. modern
8. pleasant offices
9. encourages financial responsibility
10. convenient banking hours
11. concerned about the local community
12. plenty of parking
13. friendly atmosphere
14. loans are readily available
15. quick service
16. low interest rates on loans
17. a bank for most everyone

 Results:

The importance of 17 banks attributes were factor analyzed, and cluster analyses of  each of set of factors were performed. The factor analyses were done in order to avoid redundancies in intercorrelated variables.

 The 4 factors were named:

1. Convenience and saving interest
2. Loans
3. Facilities
4. Size and advertising

The resultant factor score were used as inputs to the Howard and Harris clustering algorithm. 5-group solution were chosen:

1. Front runners (3 %) - in comparison with other segments, this segment considered the attributes of large size, a bank that was for all, good advertising and modernness to be important. Demographically, they were younger then average and more likely to rent their living quarters

 

2. Loan seekers (17%)- consumers who placed relatively high importance on easy availability of loans, low loan interests, encouragement of financial responsibility, friendliness. This group was concerned with the availability and cost of credit. They had higher then average income, smaller household size and tended to have moved more often then average within the general area. In relation to other group, this group tended to favor Commercial Bank B, which was of considerable size and Saving Bank X, which was very small, but which heavily advertised lending services          
3. Representative subgroup(39%) – this group wasinteresting in that the responses to the benefit-sought questions were all about average. They favored the larger commercial banks, especially for checking and credit card services. Otherwise nothing distinguished them from the population as the whole.

 

4. Value seekers (17%) - compared to other consumers, they considered high saving interest, quick services and low loan interest to be important benefits. They tended to patronize the two largest savings banks more than other banks. They tended to own their own home, where slightly older when average, lived in area older then average, and the husband’s occupation tended to be blue color. They were conservative in their outlook on life in general and also in their views about the ease with which credit should be given and the use of credit cards

 

5. One-stop bankers (28%)  -they considered great variety of services, convenient hours, parking adequacy, quick service, high saving interest and availability of loans will relatively be important. They most likely to use Commercial  Bank A (the largest in the area) but also use Commercial Bank B (the second largest) more then other segments. Demographically, they had no distinguishing characteristics, they more conservative towards the use of loans and credit cards and felt less available to manage their own finances.   

One advantage of benefit segmentation over more traditional forms of segmantation, its greater potential for directly translating segment description into marketing strategy