Word: lifematrix
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...prime example is LifeMatrix, a psychographic-marketing tool launched in December 2002 by market-research giants RoperASW and Mediamark Research (both owned by NOP World). LifeMatrix considers hundreds of personal variables, including religious affiliation and political leaning, and uses them to sort people into 10 basic psychographic categories with jargon-rich titles like "priority parents" and "tribe wired." To each category is attached a battery of personality traits and purchasing preferences. Are you a working mom trying to balance job, family and cultural activities? LifeMatrix assigns you to the category "Renaissance women." But that's not all. LifeMatrix makes some...
...sound as if psychographics and the Psychic Friends Network have a lot in common. But LifeMatrix's proponents say the system isn't guesswork. A variety of inputs, including public- opinion polls and media usage, is used to create categories that accurately reflect personality types. Ed Keller, president of RoperASW, says companies applying LifeMatrix to their customer databases will have far greater success in predicting what those customers will buy. Keller says researchers using demographic data alone can correctly guess what kind of car an individual will buy only 18% of the time. But "when you combine people's attitudes...
That's not to say psychographics is an exact science. In fact, there are numerous companies racing to build and sell tools similar to LifeMatrix, among them Monitor MindBase, offered by the market-research firm Yankelovich, and BehaviorGraphics, a joint venture between Simmons Market Research Bureau and Nielsen Media Research. All use different assumptions and psychological profiles to sort consumers into categories variously referred to as segments, clusters, affinity groups or passion groups and identified by such titles as "shotguns and pickups," "struggling singles," "band leaders" and "succeeders." MindBase, for example, extrapolates from a combination of attitudes gleaned from opinion...
Developments in database technology have made the job easier and cheaper for market-research firms to link databases, creating more detailed consumer profiles. When Hyundai decided to give the psychographic treatment to car buyers earlier this year, it chose LifeMatrix partly because that company's data are linked with information stored at Mediamark Research, which tracks what consumers read. The combination will provide Hyundai not only with profiles of the types of individuals likely to buy its cars, but also with data on what magazines those individuals read--enabling the carmaker to create effective ads and place them in front...
...dark side to the increasing precision with which marketers can locate and track their quarry. The Orwellian overtones of companies and market researchers' getting together to share vast databases of detailed, individual consumer behavior are hard to deny. Just the names of psychographic tools (Monitor MindBase, LifeMatrix) are enough to get privacy advocates worked up. But researchers say they are only putting to more effective use information that consumers surrendered when they used credit cards, registered on websites or responded to questionnaires. And marketers keep raising the stakes. Personicx, launched by Axciom Corp. in 2002 and using information from public...
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