Audience Profiling

VALS and Jicnar scales

Defining the audience

• It is useful for institutions and academics to be able to build up detailed accounts of how audiences are constructed
  
• Rather than seeing audiences as masses or in simple numerical terms, it is common practice to find ways of segmenting the audience
  
• This segmentation can be achieved both demographically and psychographically 

Demographic segmentation

• This is where an audience is segmented according to various significant social criteria e.g. gender, class, race, sexuality
  
• Dividing people by who they are
  
• One of the most common demographic approaches to audience involves the JICNARS scale.
  

Important factors of JICNARS:
Income, Education, (gender to an extent), social class 

Psychographic Segmentation

• Also known as lifestyle profiling
  
• Combines a psychological profile of the consumer, with ideas about how they conducted their lives in the market-place
  
• The various attitudes, values, beliefs and ‘lifestyle’ categories which are used to predict consumption. VALS, the Values Attitudes, and Lifestyles classification system is probably the best known of the psychographic profiling systems.

Teenage VALS