A marketer needs to communicate with his target audience. This communication with the target audience is facilitated by understanding the activities, interests and opinions of consumers and the different groups of audiences who have similarity in media usage. This paper (i) groups the products and services purchased by the college-goers themselves in terms of purchase frequency; (ii) explores the media usage behavior of the college-goers of Kolkata in terms of newspapers, movies and television programs; (iii) identifies whether the product and service groups are associated with specific media usage; and (iv) tries to understand the relationship between the number of hours of television viewing and programs watched, as well as the relationship between the number of hours of television viewing and psychographic dimensions.
Psychographics,
in its broadest definition, is any measurement and analysis of the consumer's
mind, which pinpoints how he or she thinks, feels, reacts and reflects (Nelson,
1971). Wells (1975) called psychographics a quantitative attempt to place consumers
on psychological dimensions. In reality, psychographic research generally seeks
better understanding of the consumer as a whole person, and attempts to measure
numerous aspects of the way he or she lives (i.e., the activities in which he
or she is engaged, the things that interest the consumer most, and his or her
opinions on various topics) (Demby, 1974). According to Beanne and Ennis (1987),
the psychographic description looks at the inner person rather than the outward
expression of the person. Psychographics seeks to describe the human characteristics
of consumers that might have bearing on their responses to product, brand, store,
advertising and public relations effort (Ziff, 1971).
Every
marketer needs to communicate with the target group of customers about his product/service.
It is imperative for the marketer to have information regarding the media that
would help him to reach out to his target customers. It is also necessary to understand
the psychographic profile of the target customers, so that this descriptive data
regarding the target customers might be useful to the creative staff of advertisers
(Villani, 1975). In this context, it would be useful to understand whether any
specific group of product/services exists in terms of any underlying dimension;
and whether or not it is possible to target the users of these product/service
groups with a specific combination of media. |
