• by Karl Greenberg , April 24, 2007

J.D. Power & Associates is adding chocolate to peanut butter in hopes of creating a perfect media research flavor. The company, which among other things studies the media behavior of a large pool of new-vehicle buyers, has inked a deal with consultancy Mediamark Research Inc. (MRI), which focuses on psychographic data. The J.D. Power and Associates-MRI products are designed to add psychographic data to data on new-vehicle buyers.

J.D. Power creates a profile of the media habits of vehicle buyers. The pool is so large that the consultancy can intuit the kinds of media a buyer of a certain vehicle type will consume. MRI's psychographic component of the study is gleaned from surveys on lifestyle and attitude. J.D. Power's "Car and Truck Report" provides magazine and cable network consumption patterns for recent new-vehicles buyers. The MRI Psychographic Supplement to the J.D. Power report will be available in May.

Gene Cameron, VP of media marketing for J.D. Power, says before now psychographics weren't part of magazine or TV audience studies of specific vehicles or vehicle segments. "We have been doing media studies for 17 years. It involves interviewing new-vehicle buyers and asking them what magazines they read and which cable networks they watch," he says. "This is critical to automotive media buyers because media varies widely between types of vehicles." He says J.D. Power provides a large enough sample to allow a broad look at cars of the same function and price that people actually shop.

Linking psychographics to media behavior by vehicle segment addresses a market more and more interested aligning vehicles to a psychographic target - people with specific lifestyles and attitudes -- versus merely demographics. "We can now provide [marketers] with guidance on where and how to advertise to reach those specific customers." he says.

The company says the new data integration was achieved through a statistical technique known as data fusion, which was applied in a proprietary manner by MRI. The psychographics will also be included in the J.D. Power and Associates 2007 Online Media StudySM to be released in August.