In one of my recent classes at Western Tech, we learned about how personality, lifestyle, and self-concept can effect the consumers thinking and feeling, how that influences a consumers behavior in the market and how they give meaning to what they acquire. Understanding this can marketers better understand the consumer. From what they would prefer to see, what is most effective, and how we, as marketers, can best reach them. It's a two way street.

PRIZMS and what they can do for you

For decades phycologists have been trying to understand the human mind, from that, we have gained many ways of interpreting human emotions, lifestyles, personalities, and the self-concept; we use things like psychographics and demographics to help explain some of this. Something close to these, that brings both together in the best of both world types is PRIZIMS.

This is a Geodemographic categorization of people the categories it created creates a good short hand name that can help you understand that particular ball of people. Business can use this too have a more through understanding of there target market. This can be beneficial for fine-tuning the offerings. If the customer base is more rural or perhaps big city dwellers, and it can help define the little things that get lost in demographic, like how many kids, the county they live in, religion, etc. It could also help direct the market department a more solid direction. Marketers when they have this information can use it too make more accurate dictions based on lifestyle and economic status.

FFM + Nomothetic versus Idiographic

Five Factor Model

Five Factor Model aka the FFM is another way of categorizing consumers. This method says there are five predominant traits in our personality's and those are:
⋆Extroversion
⋆Agreeableness
⋆Openness to experiences (also called creativity)
⋆Stability (or its opposite instability)
⋆Conscientiousness
It's not as complex as the Vals or PRIZMS, and has been said to not be as reliable. Yet a business or marketer can use this to get the ball rolling. If you could categorize one segment of the consumer base into the extroversion label then you would know that they are more out going and like to connect; Ad's more targeted for them could be more about connection and telling your friends about the product or idea.

Nomothetic versus Idiographic

Nomothetic

This categorization is grouping people together based on shared traits or variables. An example, a handful of people that are very patient in their day to day lives also volunteer at their local animal shelter. A marketer could use this to identify what similarities makes up the company's most loyal customers, and what they tend to do. You can use that to find the where for your next marketing campaign.

Idiographic

This focuses on the individual and trying to understand the complexity of just them. How certain thing may change the way the individual goes about choosing and understanding a product. It gives me a thought, it's like a singular person focus group, a focus person if you will! I think you could utilize this by using it for store layouts and website design/function. You may need to use multiple individuals but then you get a close and personal look at a real shopper and make your decisions count.

Vals

Another tool to utilize that can bring us even closer insights to our consumer base is Val's. This separates the consumers into different categories.
⋆Innovators
⋆Thinkers
⋆Achievers
⋆Experiencers
⋆Believers
⋆Strivers
⋆Makers
⋆Survivors
Vals takes into account peoples lifestyles, opinions, values, beliefs, and more! It takes in more than just the "demographic" traits, it accounts for the phycological traits as well. Things like motivation, energy, and intellectualism. There are also groups in Vals as well and they are as they sound, those being: need-directed who make purchases for needs, outer-directed make purchases based on how others view them, inner-directed buying based on an inner need. There are so many uses for Vals. A business could use it to refine there customer service, the colors the store and website use, down to the actual physicals of what they carry. This would also be a useful tool in market research, you can get and analyze the details of your target even before surveys! That could save you incredible amounts of time and money.

Conclusion

Having a solid grasp of multiple ways to look at customer behavior and understand it can make your work better and carry more weight. All of these analyses of thought process can be helpful no matter what flavor of marketing you do, being able to get a look into your consumers head helps us understand and create things that they'll love, it's our job. From the thoroughness of Vals to the in depth look of nomothetic, we can do our best to understand, learn, and create!