Marketers target the pain and pleasure of different psychological demographics. These psychographic groups help us understand the power of programming. Each group has its own pain and pleasure triggers. The six main psychographic groups targeted by TV, Internet, and print ads are: The Struggler, The Emulator, The Explorer, The Socially Conscious, The Belonger, and The Achiever. The strategy for addressing each of these segments is to either get them away from pain or toward pleasure. This article will take a closer look at the psychological psychographics of The Struggler.
Some of the Fighter’s sources of pleasure are the tough, rugged, escape aspect, the path of least resistance, and the sense of belonging. The sources of pain for the fighter are weakness, reality, challenging tasks, and alienation. The person is someone who has the mindset that they are resigned to a hard life. They tend to be poorly educated, have low self-esteem, and do not believe they have the resources, other than manual labor, to improve their lives. They are heavy consumers of lottery tickets, fast food, alcohol and tobacco. They don’t save their money because they make very little of it and generally have very little money management concepts. Fighters are routine oriented and fear change. This fear is rooted in the doubt that they don’t have what it takes to handle change.
The Struggler is a classic example of the kind of life that creates a strategy of short-term gain and long-term pain. Struggler brings that strategy to every part of his life, from diet to relationships. They tend to take the first job and relationship that comes along and then, instead of risking the pain of looking for a better job or relationship, they take the short-term gain of staying in this comfort zone. That results in the long-term pain of a hard life. Their eating strategy is to choose what is cheap and tastes good, which is usually the fattest, sweetest fast food. Fighters find it difficult to set and achieve worthwhile goals.
Gangs are made up of fighters from struggling families. Fighters feel the need to break the rules (and sometimes even the law) in order to survive. Hip-hop’s thug/gangsta image is designed to appeal to fighters. If the description of the Struggler sounds like you in any way, first let me congratulate you for reading this article. I bet none of your friends have taken the time to read this. Using the strategies outlined in many of my articles will help you break out of this difficult segment of society.
The biggest obstacle you will have to overcome to make a change in your life is to get out of your comfort zone. A comfort zone is a tendency to get into a rut or rut where, no matter how bad, you resist the changes necessary to improve your position. As the old saying goes, “the devil known is better than the devil unknown.” This is why women stay in abusive relationships or people stay in dead-end jobs. This is a reactive mindset that will wait for something better to come along, and nothing happens. You want things to get better on their own and they won’t. You will need to take a proactive approach and start taking steps to improve the quality of your life and change your family tree forever. Change is part of life. Things are changing around you all the time. To improve your situation, you must recognize the comfort zones in your life and take steps to get out of them today.