In addition to creating demographic data, marketers target different psychographic groups in their strategy to sell a product. These psychographic groups help us understand the power of programming. Each group has its own pain and pleasure triggers. There are six main psychographic groups. These are: The Struggler, The Emulator, The Explorer, The Socially Concious, The Belonger and The Achiever.
The strategy for addressing each of these segments is to either get them away from pain or toward pleasure. This article is going to take a closer look at The Psychographic Emulator. Some of the sources of pleasure for the Emulator are sex appeal, looking cool, fashionable, successful, materialistic, being part of the crowd, and hedonism. Some sources of pain for the Emulator are feeling unattractive, looking uncool, old-fashioned, looking poor, sacrificing, or being left out. Emulators and Fighters are probably the best examples of large-scale insecurity. They are also the best examples of short-term gain for long-term pain.
Looking good and appearing rich motivates an emulator. They want the latest fashions, the coolest cars, and the coolest gadgets. The colder they look, the better they can mask the doubts fueling the charade. Emulators want the appearance of being successful without investing the risks, work, or time to actually create the wealth they are trying to flaunt. Instead, they go deep into credit card debt. “Big hat but no cattle” is a good metaphor to describe the Emulator. That’s a classic long-term pain short-term gain strategy. Emulators are a great market to sell because they will buy impulsively and with biased logic.
Coors Beer used to run commercials that featured beautiful women in bikinis playing volleyball on the beach. The screen would fill with an image of female physical perfection, then fade and a can of Coors beer would replace it. The message is to drink Coors, have sex. They never mentioned that a girl with that kind of figure doesn’t drink beer, but that would require thinking. Emulators are driven by instincts based on attraction, acceptance, and sexuality, not logic. His strategy of short-term gain (“put it on a credit card”) long-term pain for life has resulted in a record number of bankruptcy filings for people under the age of 25.
If you’re an emulator, (you know who you are) make it your goal to get out of debt fast. Have a garage sale and get rid of the junk you bought and barely used. Start saving your money and go from fake wealth to real wealth as our next segment, The Achiever.
