Didáctica desde la reflexión:

Personality and its relationships to human behaviour can be traced back thousands of years, but examination of a large sample of personality studies suggests that if there is a relationship between personality and consumer behaviour, it is too weak to be of any real value to the marketer (Loudon and Della Bitta 1993). Engel, Blackwell and Miniard (1995) stated that personality was unable to explain more than 10 per cent of the variation in consumer behaviour and even its use as a basis for segmentation had not been adequately justified.

As some marketers concluded that demographic segmentation no longer had the explanatory power that it once appeared to have and that segmentation based upon personality had little explanatory power, they sought other bases to use in their segmentation work. During the late 1960s, interest in lifestyle analysis grew rapidly (Hustad and Pessemier 1974) as marketers wanted to add 'colour' to their understanding of the consumer in a manner not possible with demographic segmentation. It has been found that "psychographic variables are capable of producing substantial differences between groups of consumers, and that these differences are often larger than the differences produced by the standard demographic profile" (Wells 1975, p. 207). It is basically a technique to measure lifestyles.

“Lifestyle is a summary construct defined as patterns in which people live and spend time and money” (Engel, Blackwell and Miniard 1995, p. 449) and is reflected by one’s “overt actions and behaviours” (Mowen 1993, p. 236). Lifestyle research is based on personality and motivational research. It is contended that it combines the objectivity of personality research with the descriptive detail of motivation research (Wells 1975), and has improved marketers’ understanding of the consumer and has enhanced their ability to predict consumer behaviour. There is a view that a person’s lifestyle is a reflection of that person’s value system but is more comprehensive and liable to change more rapidly than a person’s value system, which is enduring (Gunter and Furnham 1992; Engel, Blackwell and Miniard 1995).

Despite the fact that ‘psychographics’ and ‘lifestyle’ are often used interchangeably, the two terms, although related, are regarded as being different by some authorities (Loudon and Della Bitta 1993; Gunter and Furnham 1992). No precise definition of psychographics has been found (Wells 1975; Loudon and Della Bitta 1993) but it is generally accepted that psychographics provides a quantifiable means of operationalising lifestyles. Psychographics could be defined as the description of the psychological makeup of consumers based on ‘psych’ meaning psychological and ‘graph’ meaning to describe. “Psychographics is the systematic use of relevant activity, interest and opinion constructs to quantitatively explore and explain the communicating, purchasing and consuming behaviours of persons for brands,

products and clusters of products” (Loudon and Della Bitta 1993, p. 60). AIOs (Activities, Interests and Opinions) are the prime measure used in psychographics and AIO is often regarded as a synonym for psychographics. Although psychographics can be used as a basis for segmentation, some believe that it is more effective to employ AIOs to understand segments that have been identified using more traditional segmentation techniques (see, for example, Engel, Blackwell and Miniard 1995). When segments are formed based upon AIO analysis, consumers are grouped on their lifestyles.

AIOs are generally presented as a battery of statements and respondents are asked to indicate, often using a Likert scale, their strength of agreement or disagreement with each of the statements. These AIOs can be either ‘general’ or ‘specific’. In the case of general AIOs, information on the profile of groups of consumers is collated whilst in the case of specific AIOs, the statements used relate more specifically to a given product thereby enabling information regarding consumers’ views on that product to be collected.

"Psychographics is a quantitative research procedure which seeks to explain why people behave as they do and why they hold their current attitudes" (Demby 1974, p. 28). It provides valuable information that can be used to help motivate consumers to take a particular course of action. However, there is still some controversy about the usefulness of psychographic studies. The main criticisms of psychographics include the lack of distinctiveness of psychographic segments, the length of AIO questionnaires, the lack of relationships between psychographic segments and behaviour, the exploratory nature of the technique, and the lack of reliability or validity of AIO instruments. The fact that AIO questionnaires tend to be so much longer than questionnaires based upon personal values is a major drawback with respect to the conduct of marketing research (Muller 1989). Supporters of the psychographic technique seem to recognise many of the limitations but argue that the technique adds substantially to an understanding of consumers (Wells 1975).

In many of the studies that are conducted using psychographics, batteries of statements are developed specifically for the study and little effort is made to ensure

the validity of the statements (Gunter and Furnham 1992). As a result, one must treat with caution the results of these studies. It is vital to the acceptance of psychographic studies that more work is done to justify the validity of the study instrument. The ultimate success of the technique will be determined by its ability to predict consumer behaviour.

Since psychographic research is quantitative in nature, generally using pre-coded self administered questionnaires, it allows the use of multivariate statistical analysis of the results (Wells 1975). In psychographic research the results are usually factor analysed in the search for a small number of underlying factors. These factors usually explain a large percentage of the total variance observed.