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Of course, in the end, the target group needs to be profiled on all three descriptive
levels. However, in this article we focus on psychographics, and especially on
lifestyles as a targeting criterion, because these data are of most value for com-
munication managers. Indeed, since different brands within a product category
are often hard to distinguish in terms of physical product attributes, many
advertisers now profile their brand on rather psychological dimensions (Biel,
1992). Or, as Hornik (1989) points out, the basic premise of psychographics is
that the more we know about people’s lifestyle, the more effectively we can com-
municate with them. Correspondingly, research by Chiagouris (1991) has shown
that marketing communication is more effective when end-user lifestyle profiles
are understood and reflected in the content of the message. This means that
lifestyle research is of capital interest for communication managers to ‘visualize’
their audiences more effectively.

Psychographics

Psychographics was a term first introduced by Demby (1974), putting together
‘psychology’, and ‘demographics’. He felt the need to put more psychological
flesh on the purely geodemographic bones, to add the richness of the social
and behavioural sciences to demographics, in order to enhance understanding of
consumer behaviour, and to develop more adequate advertising strategies.
Indeed, demographic segmentations provide relatively hollow classifications of
consumers, which reveal nothing about the motives underlying their consumption
decisions.
Now, the first wave of psychographic research was mainly rooted in person-
ality profiles. The most frequently used scale for measuring general aspects of
personality as a way to define homogeneous submarkets is Edward’s Personal
Preference Schedule. Many other personality traits have been used to try to
segment markets, and even today some scholars keep this line of research alive
(see, for example, Wolburg and Pokrywczynski, 2001).
In general, however, these studies, being plagued with consistently low and
even inconsistent correlations with consumer behaviour, have been disappoint-
ing and failed to satisfy marketers’ needs. One of the main reasons probably
was due to the fact that this research used standardized personality tests origi-
nally developed in clinical (read: for purposes of medical diagnostics) or acade-
mic (read: based on populations of students) contexts (Gunter and Furnham,
1992: 27, 33, 40).
In a second wave of psychographic research, the personality concept was
replaced with the concept of ‘lifestyle’ (introduced by Lazer, 1963). Today,
lifestyle is usually defined as the patterns in which people live and spend their
time and money (Kaynak and Kara, 2001: 458). Chaney (1996: 4) defines lifestyles
as ‘patterns of action that differentiate people. ... Lifestyles therefore help to
make sense of what people do, and why they do it, and what doing it means to
them and others.’ Today, the lifestyle concept has become so central, and the
personality concept so marginal to psychographic research, that the latter is