Getting to know you: Psychographics' place in public relations research

This paper discusses the contribution psychographics can make to the public relations process. While marketers and advertisers rely on building up groups through individuals' consumer purchasing behaviour, public relations practitioners have traditionally assessed different groups' public opinion to provide guidance in developing communication. Psychographics offers practitioners a dimension between the individual and the group choices that takes into consideration the individuality of the marketing/advertising approach and the group mentality of the public opinion process. Correctly researched, psychographics can also add attitudinal and behavioural information to traditional demographic categories, allowing practitioners to tailor communication to match the attitudes and perceptions of their target publics. The key, of course, to making effective use of psychographics is carefully constructing the research to generate the genuine responses that accurately reflect target publics' feelings, motivations and values.