Horizon

Wow. Not here, that's for sure! Is this some sort of marketing ploy tapping corny stereotypes about the English, perhaps? Do the billboards feature bowler-wearers sipping tea, or landed gentry on a fox hunt? That's about the only way I can make sense of it.

Seems to be based on the generic ideas of luxury and control over surroundings. See www.upperclasssuite.com . A long way from Monty Python's "Upper-Class Twit of the Year," isn't it?

...Ah there's Oliver (Oliver is still trying to jump the matchboxes), there's Oliver now, he's at the back. I think he's having a little trouble with his old brain injury, he's going to have a go, no, no, bad luck, he's up, he doesn't know when he's beaten, this boy, lie doesn't know when he's winning either. He doesn't have any sort of sensory apparatus. Oh there's Gervaise (He is still kicking the beggar) and he's putting the boot in there and he's got the beggar down and the steward's giving him a little bit of advice, yes, he can move on now, he can move on to the Hunt Photograph. He's off, Gervaise is there and Oliver's still at the back having trouble with the matchboxes. (the twits approach a table with two attractive girls and a photographer) Now here's the Hunt Ball Photograph and the first here's Simon, he's going to enjoy a joke with Lady Arabella Plunkett. She hopes to go into films, and Vivian's through there and, er, Nigel's there enjoying a joke with Lady Sarah Pencil Farthing Vivian Streamroller Adams Pie Biscuit Aftershave Gore Stringbottom Smith. (shot of twit in a sports car reversing into cut-out of old woman) And there's, there's Simon now in the sports car, he's reversed into the old woman, he's caught her absolutely beautifully. Now he's going to accelerate forward there to wake up the neighbour. ...

Funny: Virgin's "Upper Class" ad campaign seems really directed to the hard-working upper middle class, e.g. inviting travelers to rationalize the extra expense because it will help them to "catch up on work."

Try this website-www.claritas.com, plug in your zipcode in "you are where you live" and see if you think you might qualify.

See:

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/7/1/25443/62709

So where do I fit in? This is where I used to live until recently (down in the rural south):
58 Back Country Folks
48 Young & Rustic
56 Crossroads Villagers
55 Golden Ponds
38 Simple Pleasures

compared to where I live now (Central PA):
19 Home Sweet Home
44 New Beginnings
30 Suburban Sprawl
15 Pools & Patios
22 Young Influentials

The bottom line is,
They are watching and they know who their customers are.
I suspect though, that their marketing is targeted at what I would call wannabees.

Our zipcode in downtown San Francisco covers a huge range of incomes, from upper yuppie to lower flophouse. There are also several shelters and a detox.

The demographic report from these Claritas people correctly notes that we have a varied ethnic mix (via weird labels like "High Asian" -- do they think Tommy Chong lives here?) and that the neighborhood includes tech and artsy types. But it gets the income levels entirely wrong. From reading their report you'd think that everyone here at least has enough money to own some kind of reasonably new car. That's not true at all. I'd guess probably this data is skewed to tell a whole lot about people who have telephones, computers and credit cards. I'd also guess the company isn't interested in people who don't.

I think thats absolutely true Martha, telephones, computers, credit cards, and every time you sign up for an almost required "discount card" at your neighborhood pharmacy and grocery store, they are tracking you there as well. Many online newspapers too.

Talking about "labeling" people, it kind of makes you feel like chopped liver, chopped steak, prime rib, haburger or filet mignon.
I prefer to make attempts to be spam or potted meat, keeps them guessing whats in the can.
But yes, we're kind of like a meat market to the marketing types. (thats why I won't put my email out there unless its required).
You can hardly read a newspaper online without doing that anymore though. (and I'd bet someone is tracking that somewhere).

Those labels are a riot though.

Fascinating!

Where I live:
29 American Dreams
07 Money & Brains
31 Urban Achievers
54 Multi-Culti Mosaic
16 Bohemian Mix

Where most of my coworkers live:
08 Executive Suites
24 Up-and-Comers
03 Movers & Shakers
22 Young Influentials
19 Home Sweet Home

And my extended family:
58 Back Country Folks
55 Golden Ponds
33 Big Sky Families
51 Shotguns & Pickups
38 Simple Pleasures

I particularly like #51.

Of course, what's interesting is that the numbers attached to each segment is actually a ranking, which you'll see if you get the segment listing. I gather that it's by income, but possibly by willingness to spend, as Martha suggests.

(Initially wrote that sentence without the second comma, which on a reread conjured up images of Martha as some sort of Hidden Persuader)

Wow!

31 Urban Achievers
16 Bohemian Mix
29 American Dreams
07 Money & Brains
26 The Cosmopolitans

I especially like "bohemian mix". That must refer to the guy who steals my mail and broke into my neighbor's apartment. Come to think of it, maybe that's covered by "urban achievers".

Holy crap! Here's the explanation of "bohemian mix":

16 Bohemian Mix A collection of young, mobile urbanites, Bohemian Mix represents the nation's most liberal lifestyles. Its residents are a progressive mix of young singles and couples, students and professionals, Hispanics, Asians, African-Americans and whites. In their funky rowhouses and apartments, Bohemian Mixers are the early adopters who are quick to check out the latest movie, nightclub, laptop and microbrew.

I feel so violated.

I suppose "Bohemian Mix" is what investors must look for to see if a downtown neighborhood is being softened up for middle-class reflux. But why do you feel violated? Do you think it describes yrself?

Taking a second glance at my own neighborhood, it does admit we have "poor" "Urban Elders". But to them "poor" is over $22,000 per year, which is really pretty high compared with some incomes around here. What about our younger and poorer households here? And why on earth do these folks think our Urban Elders are driving Dodge Neons?

No doubt you are right on the money there, Martha. I suppose I feel violated because I doubt that a marketing person would see much difference between myself and the bohemian mixer, a type of person that, to the extent that it exists at all, I find odious.

Then again, as I get older I get closer to the crotchety guy who doesn't leave his house and complains about damn kids. I wonder what their term for that would be? Is that "urban elder"?

Once you get to a certain level of poverty you've really dropped off the marketing map, haven't you?

I kind of liked "Gods Country". I don't know what these traits have to do with God, but FWIW:
Lifestyle Traits
1. Travel to the Caribbean
2. Use Internet to trade stocks
3. Read Airline magazines
4. Listen to Wall St Journal radio
5. Drive a Porsche

If you haven't figured it out, the whole list is here:
http://www.clusterbigip1.claritas.com/MyBestSegments/Default.jsp?ID=30&SubID=&pageName=Segment%2BLook-up

My goal is to be here:
67

Group: Unclassified

2003 Statistics:
US Households: 0 (0%)
US Population: 0 (0%)
Median HH Income: $0

Lifestyle Traits


Demographics Traits:

Thanks. So #66, "Low-Rise Living," described as "The most economically challenged urban segment," still has a median household income of $22,511 and drives a Mitsubishi Galant. Go figure. What about people on disability or welfare benefits with household incomes of $10,000 a year and less? It's as though people who are actually poor don't even exist. And yet the current HHS poverty guideline for a household of four is $18,850.

Which is just yet another (what now should be completely gratuitous) example of why the market does not magically make things right and that business is no substitute for policy. It's a marketing firm. Why would they bother tracking the extremely poor?

Also interesting is that their most affluent group has an average HH income of only $115,402, and is ranked #2, behind a group with $107K median. For the groups and in the neighborhoods I'm familiar with, either this is low by a good 50-150%, or the residents are ridiculously overextended. (Of course, both is possible...)

I suspect that the rankings are based on willingness to spend, or rather liklihood to be persuaded to spend. Regardless, the average income numbers seem to be much closer to the center than I'd expect, on both sides.

The one thing that I do find this data accurate or useful for is neighborhood evaluation. For example, I completely buy that my neighborhood is more diverse than the two others I mentioned, and the range of numbers (07-54 spans 47 "ranks", vs 21 for north Austin and 25 for rural Virginia) seems to reflect that. Of course, I've got no idea how I'd use that, but it does seem accurate.

AlanH, I don't see how you're getting any sort of non-tautological political conclusion from the data. As you say, it's a marketing firm, and moreover one who deals with geography based sales such as billboards or direct mailings, rather than , say, network TV. No doubt they don't track people with no addresses, not out of some particular antipathy to the homeless (I'm sure they'd seel to them if they could), but because they don't have addresses to send marketing collateral to.

And does anybody have a clue what the hell "High Asian" is supposed to mean?

A couple of other sites I ran across that have other interesting data.
http://www.ad-mkt-review.com/public_html/govdocs/stmd.html

This one looks really interesting:

http://www.stat-usa.gov/

Its not free, but for the money looks reasonable for the information you get if you have a need for the data-and unlike the other, its official US government data, for whatever thats worth.

I think Alan H's point is that there's no good reason for a marketing company to pay attention to people who are too poor to buy stuff, so a marketing company's profile of "what a neighborhood is like" is necessarily going to be incomplete. Ergo there is a role for public services to play in assessing what a neighborhood is *really* like and what kinds of services the said neighbors might need, and the magic of the market economy is not going to substitute for such public services.

Or maybe you'd better ask AH if that's what he means.

Re: "High Asian," I think it means that a given demographic group has a high percentage of Asian-American members. Sounds weird though, doesn't it.

Ahh -- that makes sense.

Another thing that should have struck me as blindingly obvious is that the PRIZM segments describe mini-neighborhoods rather than actual demographics. Zip codes are composed of a lot of different neighborhoods, and each neighborhood has a lot of different categorizable groups of people in it, but once you analyze by geography rather than (say) Amazon purchase history, you have to water down your descriptions somewhat. So you're probably right about High Asian. And that also explains the low high incomes and the high low incomes -- my retiree homeowner neighbors to the left and single-mom renter neighbors to the right have to get averaged with me (techie DINK homeowner) to produce a coherent marketing segment. Glad I don't have to do the job.

For what looks like an example of the kind of work these people do for hire, see:
http://www.lkwdpl.org/clusters/clustersegmentation2000.pdf
Interesting as it also makes some prediction about political leanings.

Martha said: "Or maybe you'd better ask AH if that's what he means."

Yup, that's it.

To shift the discussion slightly I'll posit a very important cultural question:
Which idiom would be considered upper class: pop, soda, coke, or other (Perrier perhaps)?

http://www.popvssoda.com

Is your county profiled properly?

http://www.popvssoda.com/countystats/total-county.html

(I know Martha, saw your blog, but this is an era of Republicans and we might as well lower our discourse occasionally to engage in the important discussions of our time).

I live in a Coke county, grew up in a Coke county, am born of parents from a Coke county, and married a woman from a Coke county. T'ain't a matter of class, it's only furriners that say "pop"!

I can't bring myself to read Martha's blog, as there aren't any comments. I can understand why, but when every fifth post simply cries out for a response, it's just an exercise in frustration to read it.

It's "soda" in my family -- Pennsylvania, upstate New York, Western Massachusetts.

Now, how about the hoagie/grinder/club divide with excursions into the po'boy, cheesesteak and Sloppy Joe?

Ben -- sorry to frustrate you. My page is low-tech because I made it from scratch except for the borrowed swatch of gray wallpaper. I started out troll-shy tho I feel less that way now thx to pleasant experience as a co-contributor over here. You're always welcome to email me with comments to post, as Henry of Finland did a couple weeks ago.

We always used "drink", I grew up on Kool Aid, a "drink" was a real trip, only for when the family went on a trip.
On the other hand, I was into running my own business starting at about 7, running around town on my bicycle selling a southern delicacy "boiled peanuts". I had loads of money for the soda fountain at the drugstore.
We lived on Highway 301, the main route to Florida from "up Nawth" and the town was full of money brought down from the rich northern cities and towns.
We weren't poor and were by no means close to wealthy, my parents pampered me, teaching me how to run my own business.

That was the very end of an era, the Vietnam War came and the innocence disappeared.

(fortunately I was too young to understand the evil that lurked in our town then, racism)

I'll take up for Martha's blog, primarily because she's prescient (bet you guys didn't know a country lawyer from the South could use words like that, didya?)

Not prescient. Only went to the Derby once, & then we only won something because it was a twofer bet and the other horse came in first. We were in the infield. Joel picked me up so I could see the track & when he put me down someone had stolen my Derby glass. We started asking people nearby about it and a guy gave this funny, "oh, all right" shrug and handed it back. Wish the guys at Enron were that honest.

Did either of our Southerners here ever read Praying for Sheetrock by Melissa Fay Greene? If so, any reviews?

I'd bet on Smarty Jones, but I meant this definition:
prescience: Unusual or creative discernment or perception

and no, I haven't read that one.

Never heard of it either. Got a summary or a link?

Here's a followup interview with the author. It should give some idea of the book.

Looks interesting and reminds me "The Water is Wide", an oldie but Goodie by Pat Conroy that was made into a movie many years ago.

Thanks Martha, another one to add to the list.