Personality. We all have one, and some of us wish we had a better one. Your personality is a general catch-all for of your thoughts, emotions, behaviors, intentions, and tendencies that make us all human and act in human ways. Personality traits are relatively stable and will cause you to act relatively consistently. Your lifestyle and the way you spend your time and money is oftentimes linked heavily with your personality and there tends to be many commonalities between the two. For example, someone who has a frugal personality trait is less likely to go on expensive vacations or buy fancy cars. Another aspect of what makes you unique is your self-concept. Stated simply, your self-concept is the way you see yourself and the way you want others to see you. There are many different aspects to the self-concept, but that’s the general idea. What am I talking about and what do these things have to do with marketing? Well, all these different characteristics of you can give marketers a serious advantage when it comes to product promotion and other marketing activities. If marketers know your personality and how you’ll react in given situations then they’ll be able to appeal to those personality traits in order to connect with you on a deeper, more meaningful level. Going back to my earlier example of frugality, a marketer may attempt to promote a sale or discount if appealing to that personality trait. When referring to the self-concept, marketers can appeal to how you want others to perceive you in order to attract your interest. This can be done through assigning status value to products and services. The easiest and most simple way for marketers to conceptualize and organize these heaps and heaps on information is to place them into different segments. Segments are a very common marketing technique and allows firms to identify and target those who they feel have the best odds of becoming customers. Two such ways this lifestyle segmentation is done are the VALS test and PRIZM analysis.
VALS
The VALS, or Values and Lifestyles, test is a way to segment the lifestyles of consumers into 8 distinct segments based on the resources available to them. These segments are Innovators, Thinkers, Achievers, Experiencers, Believers, Strivers, Makers, and Survivors, with Innovators having the most resources and Survivors having the least. The resources available to us is very important for a marketer to know because it determines what we’ll do with those resources and the types of things we spend them on. I took the VALS test and was given the primary segment of Stivers and the secondary segment of Experiencers. Stivers are motivated by personal achievement and fun loving while also being image conscious. A marketer could use this information by promoting products such as expensive clothes and using messaging to demonstrate the achievement these clothes represent. According to my segment, I’d be more willing to listen to that messaging and my intent to purchase could be more meaningful than other messaging methods. Moving onto my secondary segment, Experiencers are focused on the latest trends and are generally the first ones in and the first ones out when a new trend goes mainstream. Personally, I feel that Experiencers are very motivated by FOMO, or the Fear of Missing Out, since they want to be involved with everything and are very sociable. Again, a marketer could take these lifestyle traits and promote products in a way that makes them seem trendy without being mainstream in order to reach me on that level. Overall, the VALS test is an important tool in order to identify and capture the essence of human lifestyles.
PRIZM
PRIZM analysis is a tool developed by Nielsen Claritas and stands for Potential Ratings Index by ZIP Market. In human speak, this tool is used to identify and analyze different lifestyle segments in a given geographic region. Compared to VALS this is a much more granular and in-depth approach since there are 68 different lifestyle segments compared to the 8 VALS uses. A large part of PRIZM is the assumption that those with similar lifestyles and behaviors tend to live in close proximity together. Birds of a feather, right? PRIZM combines behavioral information and demographics so marketers can further understand and target their audiences. I went and looked all the segments they use and the one I personally identify most with is the “Striving Selfies” segment. Demographically speaking, this segment has some college education, a downscale income, and rents their homes. Moving into lifestyle traits, the examples they list are “Owns a Ford,” “Takes college courses online,” and “Uses Spotify streaming services.” These tidbits of information can be very useful for a marketer who wants to reach me and others like me. In gives them clues as to what I’m interested in and the types of things I respond most to. The PRIZM site also lets you do a search of your ZIP code and see which segments are most prominent. The segments that came up for my area are:
- Country Squires
- Wealthy middle age families with a high level of education.
- Toolbelt Traditionalists
- Older families mostly without kids with an upper midscale income.
- Metro Grads
- Middle age families mostly without kids with a lower midscale income.
- Struggling Singles
- Middle age families mostly without kids with low income.
- Bright Lights, Li’l City
- Younger families with an upper midscale income.
After looking through these segments and the types of people I interact with, it all started to make sense and come together. I think these lifestyles are very prevalent in this area and could be very useful in a marketing sense. For example, the Country Squires segment is wealthy, older, and with a fairly high level of household technology so products like smart security cameras and doorbells could potentially be marketed towards them.
As we’ve gone over, our lifestyles and personalities can be used by marketing firms to find out what makes us tick. They can evoke emotions and behaviors in us in order to act in a predictable way. Now, this may seem scary, and some of you may think it’s mind control, but honestly I look at it in a positive light. Realistically, would you rather marketers just blare one single message the entire time than cater their messaging and marketing material to those who would truly care about it. With technological advancements, marketing is becoming more and more personal, and firms are attempting to be more appealing on a human level. Overall, I think personality and lifestyle marketing is the way of the future and will only become more and more powerful as time goes on.