PRELIMINARY PRE-PRODUCTION: Demographics and Psychographics

Demographics is taking characteristics of the population, such as race, sex, age, household size, and population growth and Density. Demographics are used to help enhance your product to make it more desirable by the target market audience. They are mostly statistics and are the facts that make a person. Marketers can understand these facts across their entire consumer base, they can learn how to be as effective as possible with
their message. For example, cereal companies understand that eventhough pretty much everyone buys cereal, the people that buy the product most often are married women who have at least two children between the ages of five and sixteen. Similarly, a sports car maker might know that single men age 25 – 35 are the most interested and engaged to their ads, but that most of the people who actually buy their product are married men age 45 – 55, who also make more than $250,000 a year.

Psychographics is the analysis of consumer lifestyles to create a detailed customer profile. Market researchers conduct psychographic research by asking consumers to agree or disagree with activities, interests, opinions or statements. The results are then combined with geographic (place of work or residence) and demographic (age, education, occupation, etc.) characteristics to develop a more 'lifelike' portrait of the population, which are then used to explain why people would buy a product. Psychographics are more complicated than demographics because they are very precise to what makes a person tick. It’s also far more difficult to collect the information from people in the first place – demographics are available everywhere like public and private sources, but it isn't the same can’t be said for psychographic data.
For example, A VINTAGE CLOTHING LINE, marketers might learn that these customers also have a strong attraction for 1960's- 1980's music, are more likely to watch old music videos to review their sense of fashion or go to multiple fashion shows, and buy new rare style pieces once a month. Knowing this, marketers can now combine various behavioral elements in context to reach their maximum psychographic target. Instead of just advertising on whatever sites attract their demographic, or focus exclusively on vintage clothing content, the marketers might start to look at sites that focus on music from the 60's/ 70's & 89's, or professional fashion magazines. They might target people who they’ve tracked through both ads, perhaps email every user who last purchased an item three weeks ago with a special offer to capture their next purchase.
Over time, marketers can start to build a sophisticated targeting strategy as they get more and more efficient at driving sales that might understand what specific fashion designer and what specific 70's band draw the most interest. Eventhough psychographics is a lot more complex than demographics, pyschographics help the customer base to increase in size over a much shorter period in time.