Psychographic data is all about people’s interests and attitudes. You can gain valuable insights that are hard to get through other types of data—into what people do, prefer, buy and why they do so.
Harvard Business Review’s 2016 article, “Psychographics Are Just as Important for Marketers as Demographics,” articulated the importance of this data type well: “The internet has changed the relative importance of demographics and psychographics to marketers in three key ways: by making psychographics more actionable, by making psychographic differences more important, and by making psychographic insight easier to access.”
It is easy to understand why consumer attitudes and behaviors are important to marketing, but how can psychographics improve site selection?
Before we answer the above question, let’s talk about the different ways that psychographic data is collected and reported. Surveys are one way, while mining websites, apps, social media and consumer activity data (via users’ smartphone activity) are several others.
Once collected, this data is aggregated, mined and associated with geography—such as Census Blockgroups—to index or “score” each neighborhood or household on a particular metric.
SiteSeer partners with Synergos Technologies Inc. (STI) to access data collected by MRI-Simmons’ Survey of the American Consumer. This survey collects in-depth information on consumer media choices, attitudes and consumption of products and services. STI appends insights from MRI’s consumer research to its STI: LandScape lifestyle segmentation system.
This data offers information about lifestyles, attitudes, brand preferences and much more. If you’re a broker or developer, this type of information can help you tremendously as you’re trying to lease a shopping center with the right tenant mix or fill a vacancy. And for just about any type of retailer, this data can help you enhance your decisions-making.
Let’s look at some examples using MRI-Simmons data based on the Survey of the American Consumer.
If you are a shopping center owner or broker looking for a grocery anchor for your new development, your site selection process obviously includes taking a deep dive into population, neighborhood demographics, nearby competition, access, visibility, and much more. But MRI data could help you understand the patrons who are likely to frequent your store. Here are some of the questions you can answer:
Would a natural foods store do well in this location?
Are my customers open to or interested in online shopping?
Are shoppers in my area more likely to shop for price or quality?
Obviously, your real estate research team of your pet store chain wants to ensure there are plenty of potential customers in a trade area. That means digging into demographic criteria such as income, age and home ownership. Sufficient population is essential, as is a competitive analysis of other pet supply stores in the area. But MRI data takes things a step further and helps you answer questions such as:
Are the households in my trade area looking to adopt/buy a pet?
Is this a good area for pet services (such as grooming or “doggie day care” boarding)?
How likely are consumers to use veterinary services?
Restaurants are not all the same: there’s fast casual, high-end dining, and everything in between. As with any retail site selection, you need to research everything you can about demographic criteria, population and competition. But let’s assume you’re a family restaurant chain or steak house. MRI has data variables that can help you answer lots of different questions about where your prospective customers have dined recently, how much they spent, when they like to dine out and more. Here are some questions MRI data will help you answer:
What other similar restaurants do my potential customers visit?
What day parts do well or suffer in this area (good lunch crowd, perhaps light on dinner crowd)?
How open are consumers to trying new restaurants?
How likely are consumers to eat out and how often?
Should we offer liquor/beer/wine?
SiteSeer clients rely on a variety of data sources to help them make decisions. Psychographic data offers something that other data sources cannot: nuances of people’s lifestyles. You can get to know the people in an area and what makes them buy from certain stores, what excites them, what deters them, and much more. When paired with other types of data, this can help you create an in-depth profile of your potential customers that goes beyond where they live and work.
Learn more about SiteSeer’s partnership with Synergos Technologies to offer insights based on demographic and media usage data collected by MRI here. Questions about how to put data to work within the SiteSeer platform and what kind of data will help you analyze your customers, competition and portfolio of store and more?