Using Psychographic Profiling in Destination Marketing

More in-depth profiles are available that go beyond demographic appends to your data, to include lifecycle and psychographic clustering information. These descriptions expand age and income type descriptions to deliver a much more insightful picture of who your customers are as people.

Called psychographic clustering systems, there are several approaches used to create insight from raw data. Three of the better known and highly respected brands include:

• Mosaic
• Personicx
• Psyte

All offer a similar breakdown of your customers. American Demographics, a great publication from the past, did a great job of describing them. These systems break down your customer file and sort them into unique clusters (anywhere from 50-70 depending on the brand you use) with very detailed descriptions of who these people are, and what makes them tick.  

These clusters describe the lifecycle of the customer, their neighborhood type, and delve more deeply into the values and habits of the group, providing a much clearer picture of “who you are doing business with.”  (If you're interested, Bruce Carroll also wrote  a wonderful article a while back that helps explain the basics.)

As helpful as a demographic profile of your customer database is, a psychographic profile of the same database puts the former to shame. These profiles paint a much more vivid picture of your destination’s customer:

• Breaking them down into distinct segments, with distinct shared characteristics
• Adding a geographic layer to the analysis, so you can visually “see” where those clusters are located 
• Illustrating what kind of market penetration you have within each geography and segment
• Identifying “hot spots” where you can find more people like your best customers.

For the money, psychographic profiles are the best approach to deliver segmentation, profiling, prospecting, and targeting customers all at once.  

There are several ways to obtain these profiles. If you have the expertise in-house, you can simply license the data and purchase the analysis software. If you don't have the expertise in-house, you can outsource the process to a partner who can walk you through the steps and provide expert guidance with the analysis.