"If you got any closer, you'd be living with them"
-- Claritas ad from Marketing Tools
(May 1996)
Claritas Business Information Services, a pioneer in target marketing, developed its Potential Rating Index for Zip Markets (PRIZM) system in 1978. PRIZM breaks down every zip code in the nation into one of of 62 categories. Based on data gleaned from the U.S. Census, PRIZM evolved into the detailed geo-demo-psychographic powertool that it is today.
In The Naked Consumer, journalist Eric Larson visits Claritas and describes what he learns by giving Claritas' Doug Anderson his old addresses:
(M)y zip showed elements of thirteen different clusters. We needed to get closer to my neighborhood, to a smaller portion of my zip. Anderson typed in the number of my census "block group," a unit of census geography built of census blocks.Shortly thereafter:In census-speak I lived in state 24, county 510, census tract 902, block group 4. In PRIZM that made me a member of cluster 27, Levittown, U.S.A.
Levittown.
I confess, I was just a tad disappointed.
Things appeared on the screen I'd never known about myself:I was an ice hockey fan. I bought a lottery ticket one or more times each week. I went bowling more than twenty-five times last year. I belonged to a union, installed my own faucets, most often frequented pancake houses and doughnut shops. I was not at all likely to chew tobacco or buy comedy tapes and records.
Anderson next began typing in the black groups of my past. How far I'd fallen! In San Francisco I belonged to cluster 37, Bohemian Mix, six notches higher on the affluence scale than Levittown.
I traveled by railroad and bought disco tapes. I drank malt liquor and imported brandy. I visited Europe and went to four or more movies in ninety days. I drank Pepsi Light. I did not own a chain saw, drive a pickup, or panel my own walls.
