Le Bon once said that “it is entirely impossible to have a full control of the masses without studying the personality of each individual living within its boundaries”. Individuals have different personality traits, interests, behavior, and desires that shape their own decision-making behavior.
“it is entirely impossible to have a full control of the masses without studying the personality of each individual living within its boundaries.”
Gustave Le Bon
Taking his statement in mind, Le Bon anticipated that the probability of manipulating the masses will be possible if we were to manage scheming homogenous individuals based on personality traits .
Market segmentation is the practice that divides customers into smaller groups based on similar characteristics which could include demographic, geographic, psychographic, and behavioral data. Market segmentation is used in most popular social networking platforms for targeted ads lower in cost yet proven to be more efficient.
While market segmentation is not a new concept, it helped shaping other marketing tools. Targeted Ads is one form of digital marketing in which employs market segmentation as its core concept. It includes behavioral, site, search, contextual predictive, geographic, demographic, and psychographic targeting.
The psychographic targeting is the type that drives audience to take actions based on psychological characteristics, the segmentation could includes social status, lifestyle, values, personality social class, religion, opinions etc…
people may not realize it but psychographic segmentation plays a major rule in their daily life decision-making behavior . when you wants to pick a movie you would watch its trailer first to decide if the characters are interesting or the otherwise. you would study a potential partner’s personality traits to find out if it is a match. you buy certain products as you believe their characteristics match your personality traits.
The steps to apply psychographic-segmentation into marketing campaigns is simple: build a psychographic schemes. aggregate and analyze psychographic data, leverage psychographic data for homogenous groups.
The use of psychographic profiling in the case of Cambridge Analytics has brought a massive scrutiny because its malicious affects on sovereign systems. In 2018, the investigation of the FBI concluded that Cambridge Analytics was creating psychographic profiles to undermine the course of democracy.
The body of studies on the effectiveness and outcomes of psychographic segmentation is little to date; however, strong evidence such campaign outcomes, public influence, and return on sales suggest the tool is powerful.
since psychographic segmentation can be manipulated in very sophisticated ways, it is difficult to be detected, monitored , or supervised. It can be manipulated not only to target specific homogenous masses, but also to imply psychological knowledge that builds up over a period of time.
If The psychographic segmentation is capable of changing psychological concepts of homogenous masses without detection, then what Le Bon anticipated about masses manipulation has come into practice!!!