Some examples of psychographics are social class, lifestyle and personality characteristics. Psychographic details can be useful in marketing and opinion research. They are often combined with demographics, such as age and gender, to gain a more detailed view of the sample.
Marketing departments use psychographic studies quite often to determine a fixed marketing plan. The details are broken down into three main groups.
- Social class divides the selection of people into groups that are based on the occupation of the chief income earner, or CIE. The social groups range from a social class of "A," which is someone in a high managerial or administrative position, such as a company director, to an "E" class, which is made up of those people on a state pension with no other income or those who are unemployed.
- The lifestyle class separates people based on their values, opinions, interests and beliefs. There is no one set organizational model for this class because lifestyle categorizations change constantly. Marketing and advertising agencies are constantly tweaking the categories in order to target new consumers. Some general examples might include an explorer, main streamer or struggler.
- Separating people by knowledge, uses, responses and attitudes to a product is known as behavioral segmentation. Some of the more common behavioral groups are loyalty, benefits and buyer readiness.
