As Simple As 'ABC'

This month's guest blog is written by one of Insight's Associates, Ricky Coussins:

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 British Empire was beginning to play an increasingly insignificant part. 

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: 

Social  Grade	Social Status	Occupation
A	Upper middle class	Higher managerial, administrative or professional
B	Middle class	Intermediate managerial, administrative or professional
C1	Lower middle class	Supervisory or clerical and junior managerial, administrative or professional
C2	Skilled working class	Skilled manual workers
D	Working class	Semi and unskilled manual workers
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. 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. 

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 21^st century when meritocracy rules, there is no machine to be a fitter for, Clacton holidays are an interesting historical phenomenon, 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. 

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’re 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. 

So it’s 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, 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 60 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.

For more from Ricky, see his blog and the Coussins Associates Website.