Psychographics: when generalizations go too far
Every persona rests on a few generalizations. Calvin Ross Carl argues that’s fine, until a stereotype gets stretched so far that its whisper of truth turns hurtful.
Summary
Calvin Ross Carl admits that persona work always involves generalizations. Psychographic personas make assumptions about behavior and emotion, drawn from data or shared instinct, and subculture work extrapolates those assumptions to whole groups. Stereotypes hold a whisper of truth, which is what makes them powerful. Pushed too far, though, they become hurtful.
Highlights
- All persona work relies on assumptions.
- Stereotypes carry a whisper of truth.
- Extrapolate too far and they become harmful.
Key insights
Generalizing is unavoidable
Personas only work because they compress a lot of people into a few shared traits.
Watch the extrapolation
The risk isn’t the starting assumption but how far a brand stretches it.
Detailed analysis
Calvin is defending subculture thinking while naming its main hazard. The same generalizations that let a brand talk fluently to a group can tip into caricature. His point is to keep using them, but stay alert to the moment an assumption stops being useful and starts being problematic.
Conclusion
Use generalizations to understand a group. Stop before they turn into stereotypes that hurt it.
I think stereotypes and generalizations can be totally okay, because we kind of are all doing it anyway when we’re creating personas for people, especially psychographic personas. You are making assumptions about how people behave, about their emotions. You might be extrapolating it from some data, but you might also just be going on instinct, like shared-world instinct of what we know about the world, what we know about the customer base, what we know about the brand. And we just kind of take that and extrapolate it out to whole subcultures.
And there is always a whisper of truth in a lot of stereotypes. That’s kind of what makes them really powerful, but it can also make them very hurtful, because once you extrapolate it, it can go to an nth degree that becomes bad. So that’s a thing you always have to be really, really mindful of when you’re thinking about subculture work like this, or extrapolating off of some of those generalizations of a group: just know that once you extrapolate it out, it could go to a point where it is potentially problematic.