Can we utilise 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 life styles. Marketers can have much of information for their prospects behaviors e.g. the webpages they have visited, the products they have purchased then on but they don't have a clue about who they really are.
The only way to gather such information is to convert their prospects to fill in complex psychological questionnaires, but this is naturally quite optimistic...
So here is where astrology can play a vital role in distinguishing 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 visibilitys. That information can be easily combined with prospects' demographics and activity data to reach a more accurate segmentation of your market.
The question that naturally arises is "Can we depend on astrology for business issues?" I recently read a book about astrology whose writer, a well-known astrologer explicit 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 utilised by millions of people worldwide. That means that although astrology can't be scientifically tried it has deep roots in our collective unconscious. Moreover the fact that astrology can't be tried it doesn't mean that we can reject it, this is not a scientific approach.
The usage 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 inside certain life style and personality-related markets."
The use of astrology, potentially, allows us to combine the measure of demographics, with the psychological insights of psychographics. It is suitable for segmentation purposes since it creates segments that are measurable, substantial, accessible, exhaustive, comparatively stable over time, likely to respond otherwise towards different marketing programs and have clear boundaries.
Most people agree that different signs of zodiac correspond to essentially different types of personalities. So supported 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 pseudoscience parameters we can have even more segments. If we utilise the personal pseudoscience chart of our prospects we can have a quite elaborate psychographic visibility from 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.
