Consumer profiling

Consumer profiling is a method of providing detailed information about a target market, and helping businesses to gain an in-depth insight into their customers, so they understand their market much better.

This is done by categorising consumers into groups, or ‘profiles’, based on key characteristics that each consumer in a particular group has in common. In this way, it is possible to see which consumers are likely to share interests and consumer habits, and how they are likely to respond in future. This is key for businesses that need to make plans for the future based on the market.  Profiles are frequently built around features such as demographics and socio-economic status, for example household income, education and occupation. Psychographics are also taken into account. This is detail on the consumers’ attitudes, motivations and lifestyle. More specific details on the consumer’s use of particular products are used if the client is aiming to market a product. 

A common way of separating consumers into social grade profiles for marketing purposes is to split them into categories A, B, C1, C2, D and E. This takes into account the occupation of the consumer.

A is people of high managerial roles, grade B is people in an intermediate managerial role, C1 is made up of junior managerial/supervisory/clerical roles, C2 is for skilled manual workers, D is the segment of the population who are semi or unskilled manual labourers, while E is anybody who is entirely dependent public support.

Using consumer profiling will allow a business to know their market, and make decisions based on their typical consumer’s perspective.  The result of this will be that the service they provide, meets the needs and expectations of their target market more effectively, making the business more likely to succeed in its goals.

Each of the client business’s current customers can be applied to a certain consumer profile, once the profile has been constructed. Therefore consumer profiling is useful as it will allow the business to improve their relationships with all customers, in ways determined by the habits of each profile and plan the most profitable marketing campaign, targeting the greatest prospects amongst the consumer profiles. Once a business knows what profile their customers fit into, it is much easier to market, as the business can target prospects matching their customer profiles. This will then mean the return on investment for marketing purposes will be far greater than a marketing campaign that has not been targeted to the appropriate consumer profiles.