Hi Roy,
It's a personal view (not an official CILIP one), but I am concerned that library user data always seems to rely on the blunt tool of demographic segmentation – and little, if any, psychographic segmentation of library users seems to have been done in the UK.
Psychographic segmentation would covers library users' values, motivations, attitudes etc – and is regularly used across business, NGOs, government etc
Libraries could – for example – currently be almost entirely failing to reach one of the three major psychographic segments of the UK population – and we would never even know: demographic data can’t divulge such important findings.
For instance, libraries might be failing to attract the appearance-driven ‘Outer-directed’ segment of users (roughly 30 per cent of the population).
(‘Outer-directed’ is one of the three overarching Maslow segments; the other two are ‘Sustenance driven’ and ‘Inner directed’. There are typically roughly a dozen more granular lower-level segments too. A 25-year-old mother could hold any of these motivations.)
If some good psychographic research was done with library users, one valuable by-product of doing such research is that we’d learn exactly the right ‘hot buttons’ to use to attract each segment to use the library, as well as which approaches could be alienating different types of users.
I asked one company how much it would cost to do a nationally representative psychographic segmentation study of UK library users.
I was told that for around £6k-8k a 2,000-3,000 nationally representative sample of the population could be obtained – with full demographics as well as the psychographic segmentation.
They say this is very cost effective as for the same price we would only get 2 to 3 focus groups of 6-8 people each.
Matthew Mezey
(News Editor, Library & Information Update magazine)
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