Demographic profile

From ArticleWorld

A Demographic profile is essentially an exercise in making generalizations about groups of people. Representative demographic data points include age, gender, and income. These may also include deaths, births, life expectancy migration, occupations, income and anthropological categories of people, or other demographic profiles such as education, nationality or religion or ethnicity. These data may help in creating demographic profiles which are the audience breakdowns based on various characteristics.

Usage

The selected characteristics are mainly used in marketing and market research which involves gathering and analyzing information about the moving of goods and services from producer to consumer. Demographic profiles may also be needed for different kinds of social studies, opinion research, political research and the study of consumer behavior (study of how people buy, what and why they buy).

Demographic structures come in useful in the segmentation of the population into target groups and further into sub groups that are homogeneous within but heterogeneous without, for the purpose of applying marketing strategies and for market research which is further used for target marketing. Marital status, family size, occupation, education, socio economic structure and also life cycles are some other common variables that are required for segmenting populations

Application

Marketers frequently combine several variables to present a demographic profile. These demographics (as the term demographic profile is usually shortened to) are then basically used to develop marketing strategies and marketing plans using market research with the help of data collected. These plans and strategies are designed to reach marketing goals. Demographic profiles can also be used to establish when and where advertising should be positioned so as to realize the best outcome.

As with all such generalizations, it is true that many individuals within these groups will not conform to the profile. Demographic techniques are simplifications of reality and should not blind us to the richness of individual complexity. Demographic information is aggregate and probabilistic information about groups, not about specific individuals.