How Is Behavioral Audience Segmentation Different?

Just so you know, you’re not alone. It’s not easy to bring a perspective shift to a team or an organization. How are others coping with it? I received this encouraging email from Laura Hansen at California State University East Bay.

“I’m trying to champion your methodology here at work, as it’s been very helpful so far in organizing the project. It is still challenging for me to abandon my marketing demographic mindset (was I really that brainwashed?– not that I was ever all that convinced) for something more real and personal, but things are moving in good directions.”

Laura’s talking about the way I encourage you to look at your audience from a behavioral point of view, rather than a demographic or strictly psychographic point of view. Psychographics? For example, the hotel group Joie de Vivre creates hotels that are each unique from the other, based on the psychographics of the readers of a particular magazine. People going to the Hotel Vitale in San Francisco are readers of Dwell magazine. They like modern, simple, organic … but the readers of this magazine may behave differently. One reader may be inclined to act on suggestions to reduce her carbon footprint and cut out pictures of modern architecture she likes while another may just enjoy reading the magazine and then donating it to the local dentist’s office, treating it as entertainment rather than influence. Their psychographic may be similar, but their behavior is different.