Someone (most likely someone in marketing!) just checked this out of the downtown library. Anyway, in my glances through it the other day, the author constructs 62 different psycho/socio/economic/geographic/cultural consumer niches in the USA. Are you an urban, double cap' lactose intolerant, New York Review of Books readin', foreign film festival goer, that refuses to buy war toys for your boys? Or do you a suburban byer of the latest apocalyptic bestseller fiction of Tim LaHaye that prefers George Jones (hey I like that pathos!) to George Elliot? Anyway, slice and dice any "taste" sub-culture that can be commodified- and what hasn't been?- and it's here. Lotsa colored maps too. www.bn.com has the first chapter online. Michael Pugliese P.S. Just remembered a similiar book by Mark Gerzon, from a few yrs. back. He has 6 big categories. "A House Divided: Six Belief Systems Struggling for America's Soul." (Gerzon, btw, wrote a book on the Columbia SDS rebellion in '68, have not read it..."The Whole World Is Watching.") I had a chuckle about his chapter on progressives- favored reading matter, Utne Reader and Mother Jones. In her Broadway play with Jane ?, Lilly Tomlin, made some funny one-liners about Mother Jones and the ads by Good Vibrations.
The reviews at www.bn.com give the Gerzon a thumbs down. I'd agree. Give it a 10 minutes skim though.
Heh, my step-Mom loves Martha Stewart AND Le Ann Rimes...give these psychogeodemographers a pomo text on the fractured, divided self.
The Clustered World: How We Live, What We Buy, and What it All Means About Who We Are by Michael J. Weiss
>From the Publisher
Michael Weiss expands on the geodemographics of The Clustering of America
with this fascinating look at the sixty-two new lifestyle "clusters" that
define who we are by what we buy. Clustering has become a widely accepted
business concept throughout the world, revealing a global village of people
who have more in common with foreigners of the same cluster than they do
with their fellow countrypeople.
>From Publisher's Weekly - Publishers Weekly
It's a brave new world for marketers, thanks to the data-gathering efforts
of computers. With their number-crunching ability, it's now possible to
identify many characteristics shared by residents of specific neighborhoods,
including age, income level, education, buying habits, favorite forms of
entertainment and consumption of brand-name products. Weiss is one of the
pioneers in developing this form of demographic profile, first introduced in
1988 in his book, The Clustering of America. A decade later, as his new book
relates, much more is known and some things have changed. From the
established urban areas of the U.S. to the emerging consumer nations of
Eastern Europe, clustering analysis provides a practical snapshot of
attitudes and behaviors. Among the 62 distinct American clusters described
here are unique groups such as "bohemian mix" (they prefer jogging to
golfing and like foreign videos), "old Yankee rows" (stamp collecting is
out, lottery tickets are in) and "blue blood estates" (country clubs,
housekeepers and tennis are popular) . Readers unfamiliar with the modern
world of marketing may find this off-putting, but the cutesy labels and
standardized profiles have turned out to represent a bonanza--for
advertisers, product developers, politicians and TV producers, among
others--because they produce results. As Weiss states, "Forget race,
national origin, age, household composition, and wealth. The characteristic
that defines and separates Americans more than any other is the cluster." A
minor complaint is the promotional nature of the contents, which focuses on
the work of a single market research company. Maps and illus. (Jan.)
Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
>From The Standard
Once, in the not-too-distant past, most Americans read Life magazine,
watched the Ed Sullivan Show and drove cars made in Detroit.
Today, in a nation of 270 million people, 100 million households, 260,000 Census Block neighborhoods, hundreds of cable TV channels and millions of Web sites, mass culture is but a quaint memory. As author Michael J. Weiss observes: "When you say 'oil' in Rural Industria, a blue-collar Heartland cluster, residents think 'Quaker State.' In the family suburbs of Winner's Circle, the second most affluent lifestyle, they think 'extra virgin.'"
Rural Industria? Winner's Circle? That's the way the landscape looks when you gaze through Prizm, or the Potential Rating Index by ZIP Markets,
a lifestyle-based segmentation system created by Arlington, Va.-based marketing research firm Claritas. Weiss, a fellow at the Columbia School of Journalism, continues his exploration of that landscape in The Clustered World, his third book on the topic of Prizm.
The book is part chronicle of American culture and part brochure for modern marketing-research companies, Claritas in particular. Overall, though, it gives a fascinating, and at times unsettling, glimpse of a nation divided as it enters the 21st century.
Formulated in the 1970s by sociologist-cum-marketer Jonathan Robbins, Prizm is based on the old folk wisdom that "birds of a feather flock together." Robbins took that simple idea and founded a new area of marketing research known as "geodemographics," which suggested that birds of a feather not only flock together, but also pursue similar lifestyles, buy similar products and consume similar media. Today, the notion of geographic segmentation has evolved into the "clustering systems" of Weiss' title, which are used to define people according to their every preference, from bowling alleys in Florida to social policies in Sweden.
Prizm classifies neighborhoods through dozens of surveys. U.S. census data is combined with demographics on new-car buyers from R.L. Polk, on TV viewing habits from A.C. Nielsen, on consumer buying patterns from Mediamark Research and Simmons Market Research Bureau, and more. (For fun, type in your ZIP code at ...
In 1988, when Weiss first wrote about segmentation in The Clustering of America, Prizm broke down the nation into 40 clusters. Since then, Prizm has split the populace further into 62 clusters in 15 major social groupings. The current clusters range from the wealthiest - the "Blue-Blood Estates" of communities like New York's Scarsdale, Maryland's Potomac and Illinois' Winnetka - to the nation's poorest - the "Southside Cities" in such towns as Opa-locka, Fla.; Greenville, Miss.; and Petersburg, Va.
Interesting, but not exactly the stuff of the New York Times' bestseller list. Still, Weiss manages to breathe life into the topic with numerous personal encounters. "All told, I logged nearly 80,000 miles and interviewed more than 400 people," he notes. "Local residents, politicians, shopkeepers, librarians, clergymen, even street people - anyone who could give voice to his or her cluster lifestyle."
Though he's clearly a fan of clusters (who else would define homelessness as a lifestyle?), Weiss maintains his distance. "As a journalist," he writes, "I saw the dual potential of the clusters: as a clever way to sell soap and an insightful guide to understanding how people live."
Weiss decides that the truth about clusters lies between the two, and the result is a chronicle of American life reminiscent of Alexis de Tocqueville, Studs Terkel and Charles Kuralt - with a little Idiot's Guide to Geodemographics thrown in.
In the second half of the book, Weiss provides details about each of the 62 American clusters. For instance, there are the "Country Squires," comprising 1 percent of American households. Country Squires rank fourth in socioeconomic status, range in age from 35 to 54, have an average income of $75,000 and a median home value of $230,300. Populating towns like Chagrin Falls, Ohio, and Woodbury, Minn., they're moderately Republican and concerned about issues like tax reform and eliminating affirmative action. Their preferences include sailing, business trips by air, personal computers, Scotch, gourmet coffee, Saab 9000s, classical radio, Frasier, and Martha Stewart Living and Forbes magazines. They don't like country music, Mexican fast food, Mary Kay cosmetics or pagers.
Weiss' book also looks at the expansion of clustering techniques abroad. There are now Canadian clusters and European clusters. The international counterparts of Claritas' Prizm include Compusearch's Psyte in Canada and Eperian Micromarketing's Mosaic in Europe.
This raises an interesting question: Do New York's Blue-Blood Estates have more in common with their European counterparts - the "Clever Capitalists" - than they do with, say, the American "Rustic Elders" who may live just a mile away?
Yes, says former Eperian executive Emily Eelkema. "There are neighborhoods in Manhattan that are more similar to ones in Milan than in Brooklyn. The yuppie on the Upper East Side has more in common with a yuppie in Stockholm than with a downscale person in Brooklyn. Neighborhoods in Fargo, N.D., are very similar to Friesland in the Netherlands as well as Calabria in southern Italy. From a day-do-day perspective, their lifestyles, attitudes, motivations and products are all very similar. They're more provincial and concerned with family and friends."...
CACI has its own neighborhood segmentation system, called Acorn ..., which classifies Americans into one of 42 groups. Another competitor is the Stanford Research Institute and its Values, Attitudes and Lifestyles System. VALS sorts http://future.sri.com/VALS/VALSindex.shtml respondents to its questionnaire into eight categories, such as "Achievers," "Believers" and "Strugglers."
Of course, the concept of putting humans into groups is nothing new. Though he didn't have a fancy acronym way back in 370 B.C., Hippocrates had a system for categorizing people according to temperaments and predispositions. The idea resurfaced in the theories of Freud and Jung, and Jung's "psychological types" were dusted off in the 1950s by Isabel Myers, whose ideas grew into the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, a test that upward of a million people take each year.