Lynn Carlisle, DDS

The September 15th issue of Time magazine has a special business supplement on psychographic marketing. They refer to psychographic marketing as an “emerging quasi-science”.

They missed by 20 years. Avrom King wrote about how psychographics applied to dentistry in the early 1980’s. He wrote about the VALS (values, attitudes and lifestyle survey) study.

Avrom's emphasis was the same as the Time articles: it is important to know the societal trends, what different segments of the market are thinking, what motivates them and why they behave as they do.

Demographics use quantifiable data such as age, income, race, job, gender, and location to forecast consumer behavior.

Psychographics goes beyond demographics and looks at non-quantifiable values, attitudes, lifestyle, life stages, personality traits and behavior to forecast consumer behavior. Psychographics uses sociology, psychology and probability theory to predict consumer behavior.

Psychographics uses names like, priority parents, tribe wired, bandleaders, velocity components, money and brains, balanced breadwinners, intellectual, climber, adventurer, networker, etc. to pigeonhole consumers.

I am not recommending that you become knowledgeable in psychographics. But it important to see the people you treat as individuals and realize that different things motivate different people. Psychographics is a way to understand this.

The one size approach is long gone – it never has existed for human beings. The Time article is another “hysterical discovery of the obvious” – people’s behavior and motivation is different.

There are all sorts of tools available to help you realize people’s behavior and motivation is different from Roy Garn’s “The magic power of emotional appeal”, to the DISC profiling system, to the Myers-Briggs, to Schein's eight anchors, to the VALS study.

Use whatever tool helps you communicate better with patients. However, do not fall in the trap of pigeonholing people and pre-judging them based on profiling.

Stay open, pay attention, and treat people as individuals. Ask yourself “How can I best help this person? How can I listen and communicate with them in a way that will help motivate them to improve their dental health?”

Then do it.

Go to: http://www.time.com/time/insidebiz to read the article.