As Simple As ABC
It must have all been a bit grim. Certainly the over-riding impression is of a time that was very grey and cold, and wet and threadbare. I mean, there they were, having just come through a particularly vicious six years of war, have beaten a nation led by a bunch of thugs, psychotics and moral bankrupts with ambitions to impose a 1,000 year reign of terror that would have sent Europe back to a new dark age, and most of the population didn’t even have enough money to put the heating on.
The post war years saw little to recommend them to any time traveller. Rationing was still a part of daily life. Spam and powdered egg was still on most menus. Much of the nation’s major cities were still bombed out. Most of the population were struggling to come to terms with a new world order in which the
But one of the interesting elements to emerge from all this was a little acknowledged development that still has consequences for marketers working today. Of course in those days, there was no ‘Marketing’ with a capital ‘M’ to speak of. Philip Kotler and Theodore Levitt’s seminal works on the theory and practice of marketing were more than a decade away. Few people, if any, referred to marketing at all and those that made any such allusions tended to work in advertising agencies. Those organisations that were evolving from a world where they had sold space on behalf of publications and would ‘do you a nice ad’ if you couldn’t do one for yourself as ‘as a part of the price, guv!”.
But someone somewhere was thinking about issues that concern modern marketers just as actively now as they had begun to then. A group of the great and the good known then (and now) as the Joint Industry Committee for National Readership Survey– or JICNARS for short (catchy acronyms they had in those days) – was considering how to provide useful information to advertisers about readers of their publications. They decided that it would be very helpful for advertisers to understand what their readership looked like in terms of socio-economic characteristics. This way they could match their advertising space purchases to those publications and those readerships that they thought might be most likely to buy their product (or service). That’s right. Someone, somewhere had invented the idea of segmentation.
In order to make this entirely clear to those product producers and advertisers, they decided that they would use alpha numeric segmentation labels that would relate to a group of characteristics. So an A would be upper middle class and a B would be middle class. The complete table looked a bit like this:
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Social Grade |
Social Status |
Occupation |
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A |
Upper middle class |
Higher managerial, administrative or professional |
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B |
Middle class |
Intermediate managerial, administrative or professional |
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C1 |
Lower middle class |
Supervisory or clerical and junior managerial, administrative or professional |
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C2 |
Skilled working class |
Skilled manual workers |
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D |
Working class |
Semi and unskilled manual workers |
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E |
Those at lowest level of subsistence |
State pensioners or widows (no other earners), casual or lowest grade workers |
It was pretty revolutionary and very clever stuff. In fact it was so interesting, clever and well thought out that nascent marketers started to use these distinctions for other purposes. And as the theory and practice of marketing emerged blinking, but beautifully formed into the daylight of the second half of the 20th century and consumerism took off, more and more people began using this segmentation model. It had that instant appeal of being memorable, exclusive (you had to know to what it referred), logical and easy to understand once you were on the inside of it. So, as the 20th century and marketing matured, marketers began to use this model for all their marketing planning, not simply for planning their press advertising campaign.
And what’s wrong with that. Nothing of course if you are a new bright young marketer living in the ‘never had it so good’ decade of the Beano and the Tiger, Radio Times and The Daily Sketch, holidays in Clacton, plain talking horny handed machine fitters, and folks running things ‘what know best for us’. Those distinctions make a lot of sense for that social order.
The problem is that people are still using these terms today. In the 21st century when meritocracy rules, there is no machine to be a fitter for, Clacton holidays are an interesting historical phenomenon, and, according to the previous deputy prime minister John Prescott, ‘we are all middle class now’ where is the relevance? So why do people persist in referring to these segmentation characteristics?
Our modern world is far too complex for such simple social divisions. Let me give you an example. Let’s just say you’re walking down the street and you see, at the corner, the back of a motorcyclist sitting astride a powerful motor bike, revving the engine menacingly. On the leather jacket, picked out in studs, is the legend ‘Born to Be Wild’ complete with skull and crossbones. The rider is wearing an adapted second world war German infantry tin hat as his crash helmet. You can just see the end of a pigtail hanging down beneath. Who is he?
Well back in the 1950’s or 60’s he would have been a budding young hell’s angel. Certainly what the neighbours would have called a ‘young tearaway’. Probably one step away from having his collar felt and being sent down for some violent attack on a Mod.
But in the first decade of the 21st century? No, now he may have pretensions to be seen like that, but in fact he is a 55 year old company director acting out a mid life crises.
The trouble is that the old socio economic demographics simply don’t apply anymore. Our world is far too multifaceted and varied. In one weekend I might eat at a McDonalds with the kids, have a pint and a pie at the local pub, take the family to a Harvester and then eat at the Complete Angler at Bray. Yet each of those organisations, if they are not careful, will see me as a simple mono dimensional code.
We need to throw out the alpha numerics and replace them with other segmentation models as smart, clever and insightful companies have been doing for more than a couple of decades. Thus we have badge foodies, confident managers, stationary junkies, confused commentators, misunderstood mublers, blokey girlies, etc. etc. We might (and do) find companies segmenting on meal occasion, peer motivation, and purchase preparation to name but a few.
So it is time to begin to invent your own segments and segmentation criteria. Ones that recognise where the world is now and where it is going and what that means to your customers and market places. And we need to keep re-inventing them to keep pace with the fast changing social dynamics.
And if you are one of the all too many organisations still using these wholly outdated JICNARS socio economic demographics for any marketing purpose be it segmentation, product development, creative development, research group recruitment, or media selection, well shame on you. The world is all now a little too complex for that. Don’t believe me? Well just take a look around your desk and tell me how many other tools you are using now which are more than 55 years old. I rest my case. Time, boys and girls, to forget your ABC, because, as you know deep down, it’s never as simple as that.
