Connect your brand to what customers feel
Demographics tell you who someone is, not how they behave. Calvin Ross Carl explains why Parliament builds psychographic personas around emotions, behaviors, and brand archetypes instead.
Summary
Calvin Ross Carl contrasts the two ways brands usually define an audience. Demographic personas cover the stats—ethnicity, income, location—but say little about behavior. Parliament leans on psychographic personas instead, rooted in emotions and behaviors and tied to brand archetypes, capturing what people desire, what they fear, and what the brand provides them.
Highlights
- Demographics describe who people are, not how they act.
- Psychographic personas start from emotions and behaviors.
- Each persona maps to a brand archetype.
Key insights
Stats aren’t behavior
Knowing someone’s income and location doesn’t tell you what will move them to act.
Archetypes give personas shape
Tying a persona to an archetype captures desires, fears, and the role the brand plays for that person.
Detailed analysis
This is the baseline Calvin builds from before introducing subcultures. Psychographic personas already move past surface data by focusing on motivation, and linking them to archetypes gives a brand a consistent lens on what its customers want and what it offers them.
Conclusion
Start with what customers feel and fear, not just who they are on paper.
So the normal style of targeting an audience is the persona style that we all know, and that’s demographics. That’s the stats: who they are, ethnicity, how much money they make, where they live, all of that kind of stuff. Demographics are fine. They don’t actually tell you a lot about how a person behaves.
And so what we tend to focus on at Parliament most of the time is psychographic personas. Psychographic personas are rooted in a person’s actual emotions and behaviors, and they’re usually also tied somehow directly to our brand archetypes. Usually our persona is a person who falls into one of those buckets, and it captures what they desire, their fears, what we provide to them. That’s a pretty common psychographic persona.