Don't Use Demographics, Use Valuegraphics Instead
For too long, marketers look to demographics to understand their consumers.
However, this approach is flawed and perpetuates stereotypes.
So you found out that 82% of your followers are women…
What are you going to do with that information? Make everything pink?
As ridiculous as these questions sound, a resounding number of companies still operate like this. Pharmacies and toy store aisles are filled with blue things for males and pink things for females.
These demographic factoids about a group of people tell us nothing about what type of product or content you should be making, or how to effectively position your brand to consumers.
Too often marketers and business leadership teams use demographics to define their audience. They say, we’re going to market to kids, or women, or people who make $100,000 per year… then they draw stereotypical conclusions about any of these groups of people.
It’s complete guesswork, fatally flawed, and utterly useless.
Instead, we need to categorize our consumer segments by what they value…. i.e. family, personal growth, belonging, status, environmentalism… There are 56 core values.
Using these values, we can develop products, use materials, craft stories, design packaging, create content… that better align with your customers’ core values.
This will have a much greater impact at influencing outcomes than using demographic and psychographic data.
Demographics describe what people are (i.e. age, gender, location…). Psychographics record what people did, their preferences, and their brand affinities. Valuegraphics understand who people are and what they want.
Demographics and psychographics are looking in the rearview mirror and are fleeting (people come in and out of these buckets all the time).
Valuegraphics are stable and look ahead. They more accurately predict what a group of people will do, which is a much more powerful data to use.
The Million Dollar Valuegraphics Question
If you’re like me, you’re sold on the idea of using valuegraphics instead of demo and psychographics. There’s something intuitively appealing about it.
So the million-dollar valuegraphics question is… how do we know what our consumers value?
For this, we need to rely on the groundbreaking work from Behavioural Scientist and Founder of The Valuegraphics Research Company – David Allison.
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