Let’s say you’re an avocado grower and you’re posting frequently on your social media networks every week. You’re engaging with consumers daily and sharing content about health, wellness and recipes to help with weight loss… yet your audience isn’t engaging with you by liking or sharing your posts. Then you post something about the perfect guacamole recipe for football season and suddenly your audiences starts to comment and engage. What gives? What’s most likely happening is that you are sharing content that may appeal to you, but ignores the interests of your audience (psychographics).

This past weekend, members of the DMA team attended the PMA Foodservice Conference and Expo in Monterey, CA. One of the educational sessions that caught our attention focused on psychographics and understanding the primary motivations that lead consumers to purchase your products. Presented by Brent Walker, VP and CMO of healthcare focused C2B Solutions, here is the food for thought we took away from his session:

Psychographics vs. Demographics

As produce marketers, we’ve likely all invested some time into understanding the demographics that “LIKE” and follow us on social media and purchase our products, but have we considered their psychographics? According to Hubspot, while demographics focus on who your buyers and consumers are, psychographics focus on WHY they buy. Going beyond simple facts like age, gender, income and location will bring you to understand your audience’s hobbies and values. This information is key for marketers who want to successfully create content that appeals to their audience’s primary motivations.

Same Wants and Needs, Different Motivations

You may know that your primary audience consists of 25-35 year old avocado lovers, but their motivations for purchasing avocadoes can vary from one individual to the other. During the session at PMA Foodservice, we took a look at these marketing profiles relative to consumer health motivations and values. We learned that two profiles often responded in a similar way to questions about their health, as well as generally buying the same or similar products. However, when it comes to their primary motivation, these two profiles are different. Self-Achievers are motivated primarily by their daily checklists; accomplishing a certain set of tasks and reaching quantifiable goals. Similar to them are the Balance Seekers, who often look to purchase the same products. However, Balance Seekers are motivated to try new things and to complete daily activities like exercise or eating a healthy snack because they enjoy them or they make them feel good vs. trying to check that activity off the list. While similar, these two audiences will respond differently to a brand’s content and messaging depending on how it appeals to their motivations.

Psychographics Can Provide Leverage with Your Buyers

Insights into your audience’s various motivations can provide you with intelligence and helpful ideas to communicate to your buyers. For example, if you were to discover that Balance Seekers make up a large portion of your primary audience, you could recommend to a retail buyer that your product be merchandised with the messaging/signage “a delicious part of a balanced diet.” But how can you obtain these type of insights? There are a couple of ways to get started understanding your audience’s psychographic breakdown:

• Use online forms to ask the right questions. With this approach, you can craft questions that will help to segment consumers based on their motivations, similar to how Brent with C2B Solutions did on his questionnaire available here: c2bclassifier.com.
• Use Facebook and Twitter insights to learn about your audiences hobbies. Facebook and Twitter both provide companies with a great deal of information and statistics about not only who their audiences is, but what their interests are, what other pages they like, who they follow on Twitter, and what types of content they engage with most. This information is highly valuable in gaining that first glimpse into not only who, but WHY.
• Engage with a third-party research company to pilot a study. Companies like Datassential, Nielsen Perishables Group or KBM Group (the group used by C2B Solutions) can help produce companies who want to really dig deep into audience motivations.

As fresh produce marketers work to inspire more consumers to regularly purchase and consumer their fresh products, it’s important to remember that not everyone in a particular demographic thinks alike. If we are to craft effective messaging to drive more interest and brand recognition, breaking down the psychology behind purchase decisions is key. We would love to hear your thoughts and the results of any psychographic research that you’ve used on behalf of your brands.