Definition: Demographics are socioeconomic characteristics associated to a population used for marketing purposes in business. The term applies to statistical data that commonly shows size, gender, age, race, religion, occupation, schooling and income, among other descriptive figures of a population group.
What Does Demographics Mean?
Demographics is a concept that can be applied to many fields of knowledge. When either an institution decides to implement a policy or a company plans to apply a marketing strategy is very useful to make some previous research about the people that will react to that policy or strategy. Conducting a demographic analysis allows an organization to understand the basic characteristics of its audience.
For instance, the population size and population growth rates will provide relevant information about how big the target market is and how much it will grow in the next five years. Family income will also give interesting indications of their willingness to pay for certain new products or services. Moreover, this kind of analysis is helpful to define a precise target audience within the entire population universe. Such group will be the focus of the strategy and therefore will increase the effectiveness of any campaign.
Example
Iron at Home is a brand created by Sofia Wright. She lives in a developed country and wants to provide a new home service of clothing ironing. Sofia though that many busy working mothers in the most populated cities would happily pay for that service. Since she was not sure about the proper price, a friend advised her to conduct a demographic study. She did it and found that only 26% of adult woman worked out of home.
However, she also found that 8% of adult men lived alone. In general, those men earned more than women and did not like to iron. Therefore they were willing to pay 35% more than the amount women would pay for the same service. Moreover, she discovered that 85% of adult men living alone were located at the capital city. This group totaled almost 200,000 men. As a result of the findings, Iron at Home’s marketing strategy focused on adult men living alone in the capital City.
