The two sites www.claritas.com and www.census.gov give important information which can help us in forming a marketing strategy customized to a particular geography. The Claritas site gives important information about the economic levels of the people of a particular area and their preferences in regards to the newspapers and magazines they read, TV channels they watch, and cars they drive. All these are important information that can help us in forming a targeted marketed strategy. The census site gives demography-related information which can help us further understand the information we get from the Claritas site. This information includes social, economic, and housing characteristics of particular geography and gives exact numbers. This information is useful in deciding how important a particular area is for marketing a particular product or service.
In general, there were no surprises on either of the sites regarding the demography of my zip code, 55408. According to the Claritas site, this is an ethnically diverse neighborhood with a high concentration of African Americans and Hispanics. These people come from lower to lower-middle-income households and most of them have not gone to college. The Claritas site has three different segmentation systems for profiling different demography. These systems are Prizm NE, Psycle NE and Connexions NE. According to the Prizm NE segmentation system, this geography has people belonging to the “Big City Blues”, “Bohemian Mix”, “Low rise living”, “Urban Achievers” and “young Digerati”. The “big city blues” and “low rise living” segments come from low-income families and consist mainly of singles and single parents looking for affordable housing, who prefer both ethnic and mainstream media products, prefer watching TV news and daytime programming, listen to African-American and Spanish radio and shop at high-end department stores. The “urban achievers” come from lower-middle-income groups, and are young below 35 years of age. These people are often foreign-born speak a language other than English. The “Bohemian Mix” segment is an upper-middle-income group and includes a wide range of people from singles to couples to families and from students to professionals. The “Young Digerati” segment has an upscale income with high income-producing assets. People in this segment are ethnically mixed and highly educated. Thus, according to the “Prizm NE” segment system, this zip code is highly diverse and includes people from all walks of life, from the poorest to the richest.
However, according to the “Psycle NE” segmentation system, this zipcode mainly consists of people from the poorest income groups. According to this system, the most affluent people living in this zip code have mid-scale incomes and are financially unsophisticated. This can be explained to a certain extent by the census.gov site. The site gives the exact number of people in each income group according to the 2000 census. According to this site, in 2000, most people in this zip code had incomes below $50,000 and the median income was $34,216. However, the geography also had a handful of rich people with about 195 households having incomes above $200,000. This is quite surprising since the same geography had 744 families living below the poverty level.
The two sites generally give completely different information about the people of a particular geography. While the Claritas site gives an idea about the trends and preferences of the people by diving them into various economic groups, the census site gives the exact number of people in different economic groups and does not give any information about their preferences. The one thing which both the sites have in common is that they both give an idea about the median income and the demography of a particular zip code.
The information derived from the two sites can help a company come up with the right marketing mix. Of the two sites, the Claritas site is particularly helpful because it does not only tell us about the income levels of the people but also their preferences with regards to TV channels, newspapers, and magazines. The site also gives an idea about how various people prefer to spend their money. This information is particularly useful for coming up with a targeted marketing mix. The exact numbers and percentages given on the census site can help a company decide which particular demography to target in different geographies. While the census site does not tell us anything about the consumer behavior social, economic and housing characteristics are important indicators that can help a company make an educated guess about the preferences of people in a particular zip code. In this regard, the Claritas site is much more helpful since it gives details about various preferences of people belonging to different segments. This information can be extremely useful when deciding whether to market a particular product in an area, what promotional strategy to use, how to price it, and even whether to sell a particular product in a given area. For example, no amount of promotion would help sell Mercedes in a low-income area. Thus the information is useful in helping companies make informed decisions regarding the marketing mix.
As far as the reliability and usefulness of the two sites are concerned, the census site is highly reliable since these figures are based on an actual census of the people. However, it has limited usefulness. The Claritas site is not as reliable but it gives a lot more information about consumer behavior and hence is much more useful. One limitation of the Claritas site is that it generalizes the behavior of people in each segment and this can be sometimes misleading for a company.