21. Lifestyle and Psychographics
One of the newer and increasingly important set of factors that is being used to understand consumer behaviour is lifestyle. Lifestyle has been generally defined as the of the potential customer. It is widely regarded as means to connecting products offered in the market with targeted lifestyle groups (Sathish & Rajamohan, 2012) such that a product appeals to the AIOs of the target market. Consumers are not only asked about products they like, where they live, and what their gender is but also about what they do—that is, how they spend their time and what their priorities, values, opinions, and general outlooks on the world are. Where do they go other than work? Who do they like to talk to? What do they talk about? Researchers hired by Procter & Gamble have gone so far as to follow women around for weeks as they shop, run errands, and socialize with one another (Berner, 2006). Other companies have paid people to keep a daily journal of their activities and routines.
Lifestyle Marketing
In consumer marketing, is considered a psychological variable known to influence the buyer decision process for consumers. Lifestyle can be broadly defined as the way a person lives. In sociology, a lifestyle typically reflects an individual’s attitudes, values, or world view. A lifestyle is a means of forging a sense of self and to create cultural symbols that resonate with personal identity.
Marketing campaigns to reach and persuade consumers are created with the intention to align the product’s position with the target market’s lifestyle characteristics. Variables such as consumers’ interest in hunting; their attitude toward climate change; and, their deeply held opinion on fair-trade products, can therefore be used to both better understand the market and its behaviour, and position products effectively.
It is the multifaceted aspect of lifestyle research that makes it so useful in consumer analysis. A prominent lifestyle researcher, Joseph T. Plummer, summarizes the concept as follows:
“…lifestyle patterns, combines the virtues of demographics with the richness and dimensionality of psychological characteristics….Lifestyle is used to segment the marketplace because it provides the broad, everyday view of consumers lifestyle segmentation and can generate identifiable whole persons rather than isolated fragments” (Plummer, 1974).
A useful application of the lifestyle concept relates to consumer’s shopping orientation. Different customers approach shopping in very different ways. They have different attitudes and opinions about shopping and different levels of interest in shopping. Once people know their alternatives, how do they evaluate and choose among them? In particular, how do people choose among brands of a product?