Reality Check: Find demographic differences that make a real difference

“A millennial is often as likely to behave like a Gen X-er as they are another millennial. These aren’t distinct or even meaningful methods for segmenting markets – just bullshit labels that become reality because we’ve stereotyped them that way.”

Mark Ritson thinks demographics are horseshit. He’s part of a growing backlash against the often risible generational research that passes for ‘cultural insight’ in the marketing industry. Despite this, the odour of generational stereotypes continue to linger in nearly every industry conversation about brands’ lofty ambitions to ‘take their place in culture’.

Of course, demographics aren’t complete ‘horseshit’. Analysis of demographically defined population cohorts remains the foundation of social and behavioural science, and much of the really useful stuff that filters through from academic research into commercial applications.

Get deeper into Ritson’s argument and it is clear that the problem is not with demographics per se, the problem stems from the cultural biases of marketers and how they reduce the rich and nuanced lives of normal people to simplistic and self-serving generational cliches.

Eight out of 10 millennials know demographics are horseshitAt Everyday People our aim is to help marketers get real and think differently about mainstream culture. We know that you don’t get real by ditching demographics. You get real by doing demographics right.

The chart below is from our new worldview segmentation. It confirms that real world understanding of generations remains useful. But marketers need to start asking better questions.

We adapted a range of frameworks from psychology and social science to map the worldviews of the UK population. Our model is based on a representative sample of circa 3,000 people and provides a demographic based analysis of people’s values, identity and beliefs relating to how society should function and their reference points for cultural authority and knowledge.

Of course, there is no shortage of segmentations in marketing! And the language of ‘worldviews’ is becoming increasingly familiar as the clamour for cultural strategy heightens. But there are at least two key questions at the heart of our framework that we never hear from the industry:

1. Is nihilism going mainstream? A growing academic literature provides a stark counterpoint to marketing industry stereotypes about socially conscious and purpose focused Gen Z. This argues that a significant minority have a ‘need for chaos’ and would prefer to ‘burn it all down’ rather than be complicit in the dominant social paradigm of free market capitalism. We wondered how this would play out not just for Gen Z but across all age groups in the population.

2. Do ordinary people even have a worldview? Academic evidence suggests that thinking about worldviews may be the preserve of economic and cultural elites (i.e. the kind of people that read Marketing Week). The evidence for this dates back decades from Philip Converse’s landmark study ‘The nature of belief systems in mass publics’ (1964) to the more recent ‘Neither Liberal nor Conservative: Ideological Innocence in the American Public’ by Donald Kinder and Nathan Kalmoe (2016). All of this work shows that many ordinary people simply do not maintain a coherent and consistent set of beliefs that can be classified as a worldview or ideology.

However, the narrative about ‘cultural relevance’ in marketing is based precisely on the assumption that consumer behaviour is driven by worldviews. But, if many people don’t have a worldview, or they hold worldviews that are very different from the ones that marketers insist on ascribing to them, then the whole cultural relevance project is in big trouble. So, our worldview segmentation is designed to avoid the (elite) trap of assuming everyone has a worldview.

Targeting by age is lazy and ineffective, it’s big ideas that countAll of this boils down to some fairly straightforward questions in our research. Beyond covering the now familiar ground around values (e.g. tradition, community, conformity, authority, individualism, self-direction, etc.) we ask people if there is purpose/meaning to life and to tell us about the relevance of science and spirituality in their lives, and the extent to which they believe in objective truth or knowledge. But crucially at every question our 3,000 respondents could simply tell us that they’d ‘never thought about it’!

This real world approach gives us a very different picture of the UK population to the one that many marketers will be familiar with from their usual diet of cultural insight.

The two largest groups are those with a ‘typically traditional’ worldview (i.e. focused on security, conformity, respect for authority) and those we have described as ‘nebulous neo-liberals’, the almost 1 in 3 adults who have never thought about their worldview or have no coherent and consistent set of values and beliefs.

Crucially, far from exhibiting what marketers would recognise as ‘progressive’ values, both of these groups show a broad acceptance of the neo-liberal political, social and economic consensus that has prevailed in the UK since the 1970s. For many, neoliberal values are simply their traditional values. And while passive ‘nebulous neo-liberals’ don’t give any of this much active thought, they do want to be, as Converse put it, ‘in step with the times’.

The dominant marketing worldview (‘post modern individualism’ and ‘spiritualism’) with its focus on individualistic self-expression and relativistic view of truth and morality is endorsed by just 20% of the population.

‘We don’t want empty awareness’: How Compare the Market plans to reach younger audiencesThe challenge to marketers’ favourite generational myths and stereotypes becomes even clearer when we contrast the worldviews of Gen Z (16-24) and the total adult population. Contrary to the hackneyed story of ‘enlightened and progressive youth’, it turns out that Gen Z look a lot like everyone else. Just a little bit less traditional and just a little bit more sceptical (i.e. nihilist, life devoid of purpose and meaning etc). But, overall, tradition and passive neo-liberalism dominate for 16-24’s just as they do for the population as a whole.

So, the UK is not populated by nihilists. And around two-thirds have a coherent worldview. But it’s not the one that marketers want it to be.

At Everyday People, we like demographics. But we don’t like stereotypes. Our industry’s perpetual misunderstanding and misrepresentation of age cohorts and other demographic groups exposes a fundamental contradiction in the story our industry likes to tell. It is a story that claims to champion diversity but simultaneously fetishizes youth. And, in so doing, it lets ordinary people down: failing to represent the real-world diversity of their interests, lifestyles and values.

If marketing is serious about representation, cultural relevance and commercial effectiveness – we need to take demographics seriously. This means embracing the real world diversity of worldviews and behaviour that exists within generations, and the similarities that exist across generations.