Can we utilize astrology for market segmentation purposes? Let’s explore the specific concept. One of the main difficulties for marketers is to identify the psychographic characteristics of their target groups. In other words it is difficult to understand their potential customers’ personalities, values, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles. Marketers can have a lot of information for their prospects behaviors for example the webpages they have visited, the products they have purchased and so on but they don’t have a clue about who they really are.
The only way to gather such information is to convince their prospects to fill in complicated psychological questionnaires, but this is of course quite optimistic…
So here is where astrology can play a vital role in identifying people psychographic characteristics. The great advantage of astrology is that with minimum amount of data, only the date and time of prospects’ birth, can produce their quite analytic personality profiles. That information can be easily combined with prospects’ demographics and behavioral data to achieve a more accurate segmentation of your market.
The question that naturally arises is “Can we rely on astrology for business issues?” I recently read a book about astrology whose writer, a well-known astrologer stated that “I do not know why astrology works but it does work!” Astrology is an ancient practice, it has been dated to the third millennium BC, and not only has survived up to now, but it is extensively utilized by millions of people worldwide. That means that although astrology can’t be scientifically proved it has deep roots in our collective unconscious. Moreover the fact that astrology can’t be proved it doesn’t mean that we can reject it, this is not a scientific approach.
The utilization of astrology for market segmentation has already been investigated. In his paper “Using astrology in market segmentation” (1995), Management Decision, Vol. 33 Iss: 1, pp.48 – 57, V-W. Mitchell, concludes that “Astrology may have some use when applied to certain populations or sub-groups within certain lifestyle and personality-related markets.”
The use of astrology, potentially, allows us to combine the measurement of demographics, with the psychological insights of psychographics. It is suitable for segmentation purposes since it creates segments that are measurable, substantial, accessible, exhaustive, relatively stable over time, likely to respond differently towards different marketing programs and have clear boundaries.
Most people agree that different signs of zodiac correspond to fundamentally different types of personalities. So based on the 12 zodiac signs we can have 12 segments. If we combine the ascendant with the 12 zodiac signs we can have 144 potential segments. If we add more astrological parameters we can have even more segments. If we utilize the personal astrological chart of our prospects we can have a quite detailed psychographic profile for each one of them,which can be useful for one to one marketing. The potential of utilizing astrology for market segmentation purposes seems quite promising, especially for high emotionally involvement purchase processes.