Q. Common obstacles in consumer behaviour?

When first beginning to understand as well as apply Lifestyle and psychographics communicators often run into three impediments.

* The first is by means of demographics to infer an audience's motivations or behaviours. For instance the suggestion that all mothers believe it is important for their children to play a musical instrument. Such inferences are on the basis of intuited leaps of faith and the relationships they postulate don't necessarily have a basis in reality.

* A subsequent obstacle is the multiplicity of attitudes and motivations within an audience. There may be multiple motivations for behaviour as well as individuals in a demographic category have a wide range of attitudes toward a subject. Statements such since The primary motivators for Latin Americans are home and family or Resistance to authority is a hallmark of Generation Y are oversimplifications.

* The third barrier to understanding audience motivation lies in creating messages targeted to an average. An average consumer doesn't exist and messages targeted to this mythical audience stay too general to convince or motivate anyone. In addition an average perspective submerges as well as ignores the real motivational differences that occur obviously within every audience.

For instance when attitude toward a subject or else awareness of it is measured before and after a communication the results are typically reported as averages of the total population. Previous to an information campaign a communicator may note that an average of 42 percent of an audience agrees that an employee benefit is significant whereas an average of 58 percent agrees afterward. The problem with reporting averages is that a segment in that average may feel far more powerfully about the subject than others--and that one segment may be more critical to the company's success than any other.