Sell It to the Psyche

ANN STATES FOR TIME
MIND READER: J. Walker Smith, president of the consultancy Yankelovich, knows why you buy what you do

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The psychographics movement is all about building better pigeonholes, and there is no single correct approach. But marketers agree that the old demographics-based categories are defective. "You can no longer use the previous generation as a model for today's generation," says Roger Brown, director of global research for the Principal Financial Group, the nation's largest firm that focuses on 401(k) retirement-plan administration. "Baby boomers are very different from their parents in terms of how they approach retirement. Even within this generation, there are key differences that are forcing us to look more closely at attitudinal and motivational information."

Indeed, consumers today have far more choices and, with their greater ethnic diversity and the blurring of gender roles, are far more difficult to stereotype. A woman who checked the "Hispanic" box on her census form could easily prefer Vogue magazine to Latina. "Not only is the world less homogeneous today, but even in the past, we assumed the world was more homogeneous than it actually was," says John Karlson, senior vice president of strategic development at Martin/Williams, an advertising agency based in Minneapolis, Minn. "People's identities are much more wrapped up in their hobbies, sports teams, political affiliations and attitudes toward the media, which radically affects the way marketers should approach them. If you don't go way beyond demographics and bring deeper insight into marketing, you're not doing your job."

Developments in database technology have made the job easier and cheaper for market-research firms to link databases, creating more detailed consumer profiles. When Hyundai decided to give the psychographic treatment to car buyers earlier this year, it chose LifeMatrix partly because that company's data are linked with information stored at Mediamark Research, which tracks what consumers read. The combination will provide Hyundai not only with profiles of the types of individuals likely to buy its cars, but also with data on what magazines those individuals read enabling the carmaker to create effective ads and place them in front of the very consumers it is trying to attract.

There may be a dark side to the increasing precision with which marketers can locate and track their quarry. The Orwellian overtones of companies and market researchers' getting together to share vast databases of detailed, individual consumer behavior are hard to deny. Just the names of psychographic tools (Monitor MindBase, LifeMatrix) are enough to get privacy advocates worked up. But researchers say they are only putting to more effective use information that consumers surrendered when they used credit cards, registered on websites or responded to questionnaires. And marketers keep raising the stakes. Personicx, launched by Acxiom Corp. in 2002 and using information from public records, third-party research, product-warranty cards and other sources, is designed to be updated monthly to reflect such life-changing events as the birth of a child or a job promotion. The next objective is to be able to identify an individual's "velocity component"--whether he is moving up or down the socioeconomic ladder and how fast. "This may be the holy grail of consumer information," says Charles Morgan, Acxiom's CEO. "If you can figure out whether someone is on the up-and-up, then you can devote more money marketing to him than to someone going the other way."

Gerald Zaltman, a Harvard Business School professor and the author of How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market, believes marketers should even delve into the unconscious mind. Clients like Procter & Gamble use the Zaltman metaphor-elicitation technique, which enables them to uncover deep metaphors that lie beneath people's conscious opinions on products or advertisements. Zaltman is experimenting with brain scans to see which parts of the mind are active during certain purchasing decisions.

But psychographics may not be that ominous after all. Scientific purists argue that market researchers aren't really getting inside people's minds they're just manipulating ordinary shopping and demographic data to make it look that way. Carrie Hollenberg, a senior consultant at SRI Consulting Business Intelligence, says many companies have created psychographic types by merely "assigning a company's customers to various groups with colorful names and descriptions. That's not using true psychological traits to get into who people really are." Hollenberg's firm owns a personality-profiling system called vals (values, attitudes and lifestyle survey) that was developed in 1989 using research conducted at the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford; she says vals gets the psych job done correctly.