Cultural Places: For a new demographic

“New demographic” is a term blissfully unknown in the academic literature; Google Scholar, the standard source, contains not a single reference to it. But, I have learned, it has come into recent currency in marketing. The underlying idea is that new markets are constantly emerging through a combination of demographic and lifestyle changes, and that sellers of goods and services have to keep up with them in order to compete and finally to survive. Thus, if you study the work of international market analysis companies like Experian, you find that they subdivide populations into a bewildering variety of subgroups or tribes which have only a minimal relationship to the conventional socio-economic groups or classes which still form the mainstay of Census and other official statistical sources (Webber and Farr 2001). They carry names like Symbols of Success, Happy Families, Suburban Comfort, Ties of Community, Urban Intelligence, Welfare Borderline, Municipal Dependency, Blue Collar Enterprise, Twilight Subsistence, Grey Perspectives and Rural Isolation.