The full title of this book by Sarah Arrow is
Zero to Psychographics: Your guide to uncovering your target audience using psychographics
In my review posted on Amazon.co.uk, I gave it Three Stars. This means Worthwhile.
Here is my book review.
A short introduction that’s quite technical
It’s common sense but your potential market is made of up many different types of people in different situations and with different goals and motivations.
When you’re in a one-to-one selling situation, some of the differences are easy to identify (sex, age etc) and some well thought through questions and careful listening can help you clarify exactly what is likely to drive a particular person to need, want and therefore consider buying your product or service.
In marketing, you don’t have the luxury of this interaction and if you treat the market as one homogeneous mass, you’re likely to create very bland marketing messages which appeal to no one. When you’re keen to be the first choice for some, being seen as fifth choice and OK by many, does you know favours. You only get the money if you’re #1.
Psychographics is the science of understanding how particular customers think and behave based on their underlying beliefs and values combined with factors from their own situation.
This book goes some way to introducing psychographics and explaining how to produce psychographic profiles and, if you’re put off by “blogging” in the title don’t be. It’s audience is much wider and the ideas apply to all marketing. I thought it was quite a dry and technical read for what is a fascinating subject. I think that’s probably because we lost the human dimension in a book about identifying that very thing.
The main use of psychographics is to help identify typical customer profiles or avatars in a market and how they can form distinct groups which require separate marketing messages. From going to the possibility of a market of one (personal selling) to a total market, in between you have to group and combine because there is an obvious cost of creating different marketing messages, different marketing channels, different products and services and I didn’t feel the book covered the issue of how to consolidate individual psychographic characteristics into meaningful groups that make up meaningful customer profiles.
It would have been nice to have seen a few example markets broken down into different into different psychographic groups that were then turned into profiles with different marketing messages. I think that would have helped readers understand the power of the techniques much more as they could see how different people with different intentions accumulate in one market.
I realise I’m describing a much larger, more expensive book but that’s exactly the problem. If you’re going to start down this way, you need to understand how to get to the end and I didn’t feel this book delivered for practitioners and business owners. On the plus side, the book might suit marketing and business studies students who want a more theoretical look at psychographics.
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