Your Startup Guru

Pabst Blue Ribbon’s (or PBR) rise and fall is a story of a market finding a product — unfortunately, it 170 years for it to happen. PBR has been around for 170 years but only in 2008 enjoyed a 6 year boom in popularity (outside of a brief moment in the 1970s). If hipsters were around 170 years ago, it wouldn’t have taken one hundred seventy years for PBR to find popularity.

It is better to find an under-served market and create a product/service for them than wait for a market to find your product/service.

Hipsters are known for following the latest trends and fashions, while eschewing things regarded as being within the cultural mainstream. Hence the term, “I was into __________ before it was cool.”

So why did hipsters like PBR? To put it simply, it was “retro chic”, anti-mainstream, and with many people still trying to recover from an economic recession, Pabst Blue Ribbon’s low price point was an attractive option. This brings us to a tool in marketing used to find customer groups — psychographic segmentation.

What is Psychographic Segmentation for Business?

Psychographic segmentation is used in market research as a way to divide consumers into sub-groups based on shared psychological characteristics, including subconscious or conscious beliefs, motivations, and priorities to explain and predict consumer behavior. Any dimension can be used to segment a group of consumers such as style, variety, availability, price, etc.

Hipsters avoided things that were popular and some of them were not price sensitive so they were willing to consider a range of beers that occupied a certain psychographic zone.

As PBR’s popularity grew, it was departing from the zone of consideration – the region of price and popularity where hipsters were willing purchase from. Also, as hipsterism became more mainstream, the association of PBR with hipsters caused a self-fueling downward cycle.

How to Use Psychographic Segmentation for Business?

Since you don’t have over one hundred fifty years for your product or service to be found by a market, it is better to find an under-served market and create a product/service for them than wait for a market to find your product/service. You can read about more businesses that found a need and filled that need.

Your Startup Guru used psychographic analysis to differentiate our client’s brand from that of their competitors yet stay true to their envisioned identity:

How to Do Market Research for Business?

There are many sources at your disposal to gain a deeper insight into who your customers are and segments within that market.

• Ask potential customers: Surveying is a form of primary market research. Ask them how they use their product, what they like/dislike about it. How long they have used it, is it expensive, how does it make them feel, etc. These questions will give you valuable insight on the psychology of the user.
• Pose as a customer and visit your competitor’s store/website. Learn how they do what they do. See what they do well, what they can improve on. Sometimes employees are very happy to share details you cannot find anywhere else.
• Industry and market research companies such as IBISWorld, Pew Research Center, Audience Overlap Tool, Statista are loaded with great information. The downside is that they can be expensive. Less expensive options include the SBA’s Office of Entrepreneurship, US Census data, and older reports/white papers.
• Industry and trade publications for your particular sector are also a great source of information. Some are free while some require memberships.

So What Should Pabst Blue Ribbon Do?

Given that hipsterism is on the way out, a brand extension with Pabst [pick your color] Ribbon which is guerilla marketed to a new niche market segment such as Yuccies: Young Urban Creatives (that are a slice of Gen Y) with product placement on their YouTube channels is a viability…or wait another +100 years for market tastes to circle back.

Contact us today to get started on market research that will help pinpoint your target market.