Psychographics and personas: how to get to the truth about why people buy

What do you know about your customers? Do you know what actually makes them buy or why they choose you?

Conventional wisdom says you can perform audience segmentation by studying demographics such as age, location, and education of your target audience. 

Some marketers go beyond demographics by taking psychographic data into consideration, looking at attitudes, values, and desires.

But if you want to create marketing campaigns that truly engage your target audience, you need to understand a third type of data: buyer behavior psychographics. 

My name is Adele Revella, and I’m the CEO of the Buyer Persona Institute and author of “Buyer Personas”. 

In this article, I’m going to show you how to combine demographics and psychographics with a special focus on understanding why people buy, how they buy, and how to use these insights to make an impact with your marketing.

What is psychographics?

Psychographics is the qualitative methodology of studying consumers based on psychological characteristics and traits such as values, social status, desires, goals, interests, and lifestyle choices. 

Psychographics in marketing focuses on understanding the consumer’s emotions and values, so you can market more accurately and better understand consumer behavior.

Psychographic data vs. demographic data

Demographic data focuses on insights like age, gender, education, income, and geographic location.

Demographics tend to be quantitative whereas psychographics tend to be qualitative.

Ideally, you should use psychographics, demographics, and buyer behavior data (which we’ll go over next) to build buyer personas to help guide your marketing strategy.

10 psychographic characteristics

The 2 types of psychographics to consider are:

1. Traditional psychographics: data that tells you about people’s attitudes and beliefs

2. Buyer behavior psychographics: data that describes how someone turns into a buyer of your product/service, based on the Buyer Persona Institute’s 5 Rings of Buying Insight

You need both for a strong buyer persona. 

For example, a standard buyer persona might introduce you to 'Madison, a 35-year-old project manager who loves cats and yoga.' 

This buyer persona contains demographic and psychographic characteristics. 

But what does this actually mean for your business? Does her love of cats or approach to exercise help you influence her choice to try out your project management software?

You’ll know the answers to questions like these when you pair the 2 types of psychographic characteristics together: traditional psychographics and buyer behavior psychographics.

5 traditional psychographic characteristics

1. Personalities

Personality describes the collection of traits that someone consistently exhibits over time, commonly assessed through a 5-factor model.

The 5-factor model personality traits are:

1. Openness: this trait reflects whether someone is open to new experiences or if they’re resistant to change

2. Conscientiousness: this trait indicates whether someone prefers structure, organization, and dependability, or is more spontaneous and less disciplined

3. Extroversion: this trait describes whether someone is outgoing, energetic, and sociable, or more reserved, reflective, and solitary

4. Agreeableness: this trait shows whether someone prioritizes harmony, cooperation, and empathy, or is more competitive, critical, and less concerned with others' feelings

5. Neuroticism: this trait measures whether someone is generally anxious, prone to negative emotions, and easily stressed, or calm, emotionally stable, and resilient

Example: a company that sells fishing gear online discovers their average customers are men who score low in extraversion (meaning they’re mostly introverted). So, they might want to include images of men enjoying solitude and fishing alone on their landing pages and social media accounts.

2. Lifestyles

Lifestyle is the collection of someone’s day-to-day activities and includes things like their associations, where they live, and where they spend their time.

Example: a company that owns a meditation app finds that many of their users are single individuals who like to spend their weekends partying. With this information, the marketing team might create advertising campaigns that speak to the need to disconnect from the hectic pace of city life.

3. Interests

Interests include hobbies, pastimes, media consumption habits, and what occupies someone’s time.

Example: an online poker website discovers that a substantial proportion of its users also enjoy watching soccer. This might prompt the company to use sporting analogies in their ad campaigns (Ex: referring to a big tournament as the “World Cup” of online poker).

4. Opinions, attitudes, and beliefs

Opinions, attitudes, and beliefs are distinct psychographic categories, but I’ve grouped them together because they tend to be strongly correlated. 

Example: a fitness brand finds that their customers have a supportive attitude towards body inclusivity and body positivity. They might focus on campaigns that celebrate diverse body types.

5. Values

Someone’s values describe their sense of right and wrong.

Example: a food delivery service learns their customers care deeply about the environment and sustainability. They might benefit from delivering meals in biodegradable containers.

5 buyer behavior psychographic characteristics

1. Priority initiatives

Priority initiatives explain why some buyers are willing to invest in a solution like yours and what separates them from those who are fine with the status quo.

Priority initiatives aren’t just pain points that your features are designed to reverse. You want to understand the precise circumstances that lead people to pursue a solution like yours.

Example: what makes a project manager seek out new software to organize their team? How do their current solutions fall short and what would inspire them to implement a new system, even though it might result in unhappy employees and critical managers who resist change?

2. Success factors

Success factors are similar to benefits, but they’re more specific and defined. What results do they expect to achieve by purchasing your solution?

Example: if a person wants to buy a new computer, you might assume that speed and computing power matters. But what if speed and power aren’t important to them? What if the prestige that comes with owning a MacBook Pro, and the feeling its sleek design gives them, matters more than tech specs in the end?

3. Perceived barriers

What could make a potential customer worry they’re making the wrong choice? When interviewing people who recently evaluated a solution like yours, expect to discover plenty of misconceptions—including issues you’ve already solved and some that never existed in the first place. The resistance may come from buyers themselves, but it could also come from peers, friends, family, or colleagues.

Example: does a mobile phone carrier have a reputation for dropped calls in a major city, despite the fact they have a better-than-average record? If a sales manager wants to purchase a cell phone service for their entire sales team, their supervisors or employees might plant seeds of doubt based on a popular misconception.

4. Decision criteria

Which features of competing companies, products, or services do your customers consider essential to make a purchase? What are their expectations for each feature? What makes them leave a website, and what makes them stay?

This insight will shape your marketing strategy, and it usually has nothing to do with what’s new or what makes your product truly unique.

Example: when looking for scheduling software to book appointments, does a busy sales professional care how much it costs if the company is willing to pay for it? They may be more concerned with ease of use (for both themselves and anyone who books a meeting with them).

5. Buyer’s journey

This is where you aggregate everything you learn about the steps your buyers take, the resources they trust, and the influencers involved, from beginning to the end.

Example: when someone considers buying a luxury watch, they might shop online, visit a few stores, and be influenced by articles they’ve read or their peers’ recommendations. With that in mind, it makes sense to study:

• What did they do first when they decided to shop for a new watch?

• How did they hear about the different brands they’re considering?

• Who/what resources influenced their decision?

How to collect data for psychographic segmentation

The easiest way to collect data for market segmentation is to hear directly from your target audience. 

Even better, you don’t need a huge budget to collect reliable and useful insights.

Method 1: non-scripted customer interviews

Non-scripted customer interviews open up 2-way communication where you can speak with your audience 1:1.

The questions you ask depend on what information you want from your interview. But a good question to include is this:

“What happened on the day you first decided you needed to solve this kind of problem or achieve this goal? Not to buy my product, that’s not the day. We want to go back to the day when you thought it was urgent and compelling to spend money to solve a particular problem or achieve a goal. Just tell me what happened.”

After the interviewee answers the question, ask them to clarify, elaborate, and dive deeper. Get them to walk you through every step of their buying journey. (You might spend 5 to 10 minutes learning about their motivations for their decision to buy.)

After, ask them to talk about what they did first to learn about the companies they were considering to buy from. 

Finally, ask them to discuss how they narrowed their options, who was involved, and what they learned about the solutions they evaluated. 

Your customers’ answers will clue you into the subtle motivations that made them choose you over the competition and the barriers that prevented them from buying from your competitors.

💡 Pro tip: Contentsquare’s Interviews capability lets you easily schedule and conduct customer interviews. Plus, you can use the platform’s pool of 200,000+ participants to find interviewees outside of our customer base to gather more diverse insight.

Contentsquare’s AI-powered Interviews capability not only automatically transcribes your interviews, but also lets you create highlight clips of key emotional drivers and leave comments for better collaboration with your team members—helping you build richer, psychology-driven buyer personas.

Contentsquare's Interviews capability lets you highlight key moments, share instantly, and collaborate with your team

Method 2: surveys

Surveys are a great way to hear directly from your target audience, gain confidence in the results of your interviews, and get a deeper insight into what is most or least important to buyers. 

With Contentsquare’s Surveys capability, you can add surveys to your website or send survey links to potential participants. Contentsquare’s free user persona survey template asks questions that will tell you:

• Who your users are and how they describe themselves 

• What their main goal is

• The barriers users face 

• How they use your product today

Get clarity on survey responses by letting customers answer in their own words with Contentsquare

And with Contentsquare’s built-in AI, creating smart surveys is easy—helping you to ask the right questions to gather the insights you need, faster and with less guesswork.

Set your survey goal and let Contentsquare’s AI assistant generate survey questions for you

⭐ Caveat: use caution as you create a customer survey, because you could end up merely reinforcing your existing perceptions and biases. It’s best to do the interviews first to discover the psychographics of the buying decision, and then use the survey to test your insights and learn how different markets or audiences think about the decision itself.

Method 3: focus groups

A focus group brings together a carefully selected, demographically diverse set of potential clients for a guided discussion about a product or service.

Focus groups are great when you want to expose your product or campaign to a target group of customers and see/hear their reactions. The group dynamic is ideal for this purpose, but isn't ideal for capturing individual stories and experiences (also, you need a strong facilitator to avoid the discussion being led astray by strong personalities within the group). 

Focus groups can also be expensive and run anywhere from $2,000 to $15,000. Their hefty expense may make them unattainable for those who want to collect psychographic data on a budget. 

Method 4: brainstorm with internal stakeholders

Many people within your company will have information about your target customers (like your sales team or customer support team). 

Speak with these teams and ask them questions to uncover psychographic characteristics about your audience.

However, keep in mind that internal stakeholders’ opinions are shaped by their own biases and interactions. 

For example, buyers often withhold critical information from salespeople and relate price as a critical aspect of their decision as a negotiation tactic. So, your sales team may think that price holds more weight in the buyer’s process than it actually does.

You can try to counteract these biases by speaking with a range of teams to gather diverse opinions on your buyers.

How to use psychographic research

Once you’ve gathered enough data, it’s time to put that information to good use. 

Here’s how:

1. Review data with internal Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)

Organize workshops and go through all your customer data with internal SMEs who understand your product (especially product managers and salespeople).

Use these workshops to match your data with customer quotes.

For example, say your data highlights that people often use their mobile devices to access your product’s dashboard.

Find user quotes (from your surveys, interviews, etc) that support this insight.

2. Identify your top selling points

You’ll come up with many insights, but you can’t address them all, so focus on that sweet spot where your product meets what your customers want.

Review your data and customer quotes (from the previous step) to find your top selling points. These might be the points that had the most customer quotes (indicating that people brought it up the most). Or the points that had passionate language (Ex: rather than someone saying they “like” a certain feature, they might say they “can’t live without it”).

This means you may have to stop pushing some of your favorite features and benefits. Do you love the fact that your product comes in different colors? If your ideal customers don’t love it, you’ve got to drop that selling point and focus on the messaging that works.

3. Train your sales team

As a career business-to-business (B2B) marketer, one thing I’ve noticed is that companies struggle to align their sales and marketing messages.

If you look at what sales is trained to do, the messaging in the product demos hardly ever matches up with the marketing message. After you’ve done the market research, however, you’ll know what your customers want (and you’ll have direct quotes to back your conclusions up). Then you’ve got to get marketing and sales on the same page.

4. Focus on what really matters

You’ll be tempted to do a million different things based on what you learn, but time and budget are always limiting factors. Here’s what you should focus on:

1. Optimize your website: perfect the buying experience to deliver exactly what your ideal customers want

2. Update your product roadmap to address buying needs: product usage criteria and product buying criteria are 2 different things. Product managers focus on making products that customers love once they start using them, but they also need to consider what features will make someone buy the product in the first place. After all, if customers don’t buy a product, they’ll never get a chance to experience it.

3. Refine your messaging: make sure your messaging (on your website, in marketing communications, and in sales talking points) pulls those psychological levers that make people buy. Use what works and discard what doesn’t.

Examples of psychographics in action

Here’s an example of a real organization we helped with this technique. We used this method to bust assumptions and help them better serve a key customer segment.

The product: our client creates software that automatically calculates sales tax for e-commerce businesses. Companies doing business in the U.S. are sometimes required to collect sales tax at the point-of-sale, and different states have different tax rates.

The assumption: like most companies, our client segmented their customers based on organizational size (a demographic criterion), and the marketing team crafted the messaging accordingly.

But, what they learned through interviews was that they needed to segment based on entirely different criteria.

• Segment #1: mid-size and large companies with in-house accounting departments that kept them in compliance (or had the money to outsource it)

• Segment #2: small companies that did everything on their own

What’s the difference? Small companies knew they could be doing it wrong, and if they messed up, they might end up in jail (a psychographic criterion). Pretty valuable insight, wouldn’t you say?

With this psychographic data, they were able to adjust their website, product, and messaging to address that concern, and they increased sales based on this segment.

Collect psychographic information to guide your marketing campaigns

Creating fully fleshed-out buyer personas built with psychographics, demographics, and buyer behavior can take your marketing campaigns, messaging, and conversion rates to the next level.

But to create one, you need a way to hear from your buyers.

Contentsquare puts you in direct contact with your target audience through surveys and interviews, so you can create buyer personas based on data rather than guesswork.

Ready to learn more about your audience? Try Contentsquare for free, today.