Know-How Exchange : Student Questions

Hi, silentlady,

Demographics do not affect purchasing, people affect purchasing. Demographics describe the characteristics of the people under discussion - in this case purchasers. Saying democraphics affect purchasing is a lot like saying that the color blue affects the sky.

What affects purchasing is people's needs, their influences and motivations, their perceptions based upon their influences and motivations on how well product alternatives satisfy their needs and how effective the various competitors are at presenting their case to the customers on how well their products and services meet their needs.

Demographics are "after-the-fact" categorizing of people trying to understand - again, "after the fact" - why certain people are affected by certain positions and messages. It's a way to collect people into groups based in observations to help predict future affects on these people.

I hope this helps.

Wayde

Hi silentlady -

I think what these folks have been saying is correct - demographics themselves do not affect purhasing. They are just a way of categorizing people into groups that have similar purchasing characteristics.

Let's take, for example, IPods. It is likely that when launching this product, Apple did some market research to see who would be most likely to purchase this product. There were probably some demographic variables important in seeing who was most likely to purchase. For example, people with certain income levels may have been more likely to purchase because they could afford the product. However, there were probably lots of behavioral and motivational characteristics of these people that made them more likely to purchase, as well -I think this is what Greg, for example, is alluding to above.

However with this income information, Apple was able to make some marketing decisions that would help them improve their marketing investments. For example, they were probably able to choose media that people of certain income levels used. This way, they were able to use demographic data to better drive their marketing decisions and investments. Of course, I have no idea if or what kind of research Apple did - I am just using this to illustrate the point of how demographics can be used in marketing.

By themselves, demographics don't affect purchasing. They are just descriptions of people that may give clues to how they behave so that companies can target their marketing efforts better.

Hope this helps,
Joy