Via the comments at Languagehat, I’ve stumbled across a gold mine of a resource for my understanding of the multiplicitous American class system. Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s weblog Making Light has an entry on “House, home, and demographic facts” featuring links to the amazingly detailed demographic breakdowns by zip code at MSN House & Home’s Neighborhood Finder: wealth, income, culture, consumptive habits, all according to Tetrad’s sixty-odd Prizm segments. I’ll have to take a closer look, because the Prizm site doesn’t offer the consumptive habits that MSN’s site features, and that I find so interesting: I’m wondering to what degree it’s based on the government census data prominently advertised on the Prizm site. One of the commenters on the Making Light thread mentions the “iMark database”, which I wonder if I might be able to get to via the university library (a quick try says no, but I’ll ask the reference librarian tomorrow, and also see what Charlie might suggest). A couple of the commenters there also question the accuracy of how well the classes fit the zip codes, which I’m not nearly as interested in as I am in the classificatory system itself. Teresa, Languagehat — y’all have made my evening. Thanks.
Gold Mine
Glad you found this. In business we call this “market segmentation,” or “market seg” for short. This is how Corporate America views its customer base. We want to know what segment they fall into because it is predictive of purchasing behavior. Once we know you zip code we can target ads and solicitations, and gear products, “to serve you better.” Class by contrast is a blunt instrument, as you can guickly see. Note that where you live matters, how you got there not. That is, your house and street tell us more than whether you came their by birth, or by your own efforts. Though inheritors may cluster together in certain zips as well.
A varient of this is “aspirational segment.” I vividly remember in NYC a decade ago riding an elevator in the corporte tower with a black kid of maybe 19, who must have had an entry level job, since he was not wearing the usual suit. Instead, he wore pristine set of white Nautica clothes, as if he were headed for his Yatch.
I was stunned, and touched. He aspired to the images of success evoked in the ads for the super-prep clothes he wore. As a marketing guy I was thinking, “Does Nautica want this? Have they targeted poor inner city blacks? Or is this scewing up their ad campaign?” You wouldn’t know unless you were inside Nautica. Someone there might be tracking the marketing hotspots by zip and making an executive level decision as to whether to build on that momentum or defuse it.
Market seg is a feedback loop, you can send out a signal, with ads and products, and measure the repsonse in sales, market share, profit. Then send out a variant of the signal, over and over, until you get “missile lock”
Another term for this is niche marketing. Class is way to broad to be useful. We want to know exactly what black kids in what neighborhood are buying the latest Yatch wear, so we can refine the message, and maximize results.
Yes, Mike, Market Seg is a goldmine. The marketers get the gold and we get the shaft. Actually, the consumer gets exactly what he or she wants, that is the fatal power of marketing — that it satisfies our every debased wish, feeds on our most personal aspirations.
“Marketing cluster” is another phrase you might search on in Google, if you want to tap into this world.