JICNARS is a scale used to divide up audiences into social grades. JICNAR stands for Joint Industry Committee for National Readership Surveys, in other words its just a survey that divides people up into group helping other people make judgements about those people. JICNAR is a common demographic segmentation tool used by institutions and academics to be able to build up detailed accounts of audiences.
Here is an image of the grading scale.
However this method of segmenting audiences is somewhat outdated. Due to it being primarily focused around ones education, salary and skill, our social environments evolving we find that C2 in some instances can be making more than A/B due to practical work being at a higher demand, therefore C2’s are able to charge higher prices.
So far what we have learn’t from this post is that JICNAR’s are a profiling tool, and now we move onto VALS, which are unlike JICNAR’s which focus on demographic segmentation, VALS focus on psychographic segmentation, this is known as the lifestyle profiling. VALS stand for Values, Attitudes and Lifestyle classification system.This method of profiling combines both psychological profiling of the consumer, with idea about how they conduct their life in the market place, which is used in order to predict consumer consumption. Attitudes, values, beliefs and lifestyle choices are all sorted into a number of distinctive categories segmenting up the audience.
Here are some VALS.
These profiling techniques enable institutions the ability to manipulate audiences into purchasing the products that institutions are trying to sell next.
The VALS shown above are strictly for adults. Teenagers are a completely different story. You will see a similarity in VALS from above but directed at a younger audience.
From what has been described and showed above I believe we can come to the conclusion that the profiling technique of VALS, especially, is a reductionist method of categorising audiences behaviours due to it not taking into the account of the whole person but rather a group. However when you do look at the bigger picture, in reality you find everyone is as original as they like to believe, everyone is unique as their own but once the lens is lifted you see that groups for example gender, illustrate how easily mass amounts of people become one. This allows institutions to narrow down who would be interested in their artist and how they can target them.
