Knowing your audience has never been a more critical element of business success than it is now in the digital era. Digital age customers are educated about purchases and brands to which they are loyal, and they are vocal about these things on social media. This increases both the importance of understanding brand audiences and enables doing so at a previously unheard of speed and scale. There are, however, different levels of “knowing” the customer that impact digital brand marketing, and more specifically, social media strategy. Two of these levels are demographics and psychographics.
Demographics are factual and fixed information about the makeup of a population, whereas psychographics are insights and understanding about the thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and interests of a population. For example, if we look at the group “potato chip buyers” in the United States, demographics might show 15% of them are in the age range 25-35 and 20% of them live in Texas. For the same group, psychographics could show things like they feel angry about increased food prices or enjoy watching baseball. When considering a group of consumers for a particular product, demographic information never reveals any opinions about the product. Psychographic information can reveal product opinions, but it doesn’t have to. While both demographics and psychographics are used to understand a group of people, demographics create a physical and spatial shell of the typical group member, while psychographics show how that person processes information and approaches life…
The Customer May Always Be Right, But Are We Targeting the Right Customer?
