Several thousand years ago, when I was on leave from journalism and working as a marketing dweeb, my small North Carolina firm learned about PRIZM (Potential Rating Index for Zip Markets), a techy new service that told me that my rural zip code was “Hardscrabble,” while the next one over was a suburb PRIZM called “Volvo Wagons” or something.
My current zip, in Bloomington, Indiana, features five out of PRIZM’s 68 numbered types:
- 48 Generation Web—Low Income Younger Family Mix
- 47 Striving Selfies—Lower Midscale Middle Age Mostly w/o Kids
- 15 New Homesteaders—Wealthy Middle Age Mostly w/ Kids
- 51 Campers & Camo—Lower Midscale Middle Age Family Mix
- 66 New Beginnings—Low Income Younger Family Mix
None of which describes me or my wife.
Sort of close is 05 – Country Squires: “Members of this segment fled the city life for the charms of small-town living. Many have executive jobs and live in recently built homes.” Except we didn’t flee and our home was built in 1899 or 1915. (Sources differ.) But we are building a house, so maybe that counts.
A bit closer is 20 – Empty Nests: “Most residents are over 65 years old, but they show no interest in a rest-home retirement. With their grown-up children out of the house they pursue active, and activist, lifestyles.”
But all of that stuff is just name-calling against typified populations—a form of -ism not much different than racism, sexism, or ageism. That’s why, on the receiving end, we tend not to like it, even if it brings us ‘relevant’ messages from sellers. (This happens far less than sellers think, and typically at the cost of privacy lost to surveillance.)
All of us are as different as our faces and voices. Being different than everybody—even ourselves five minutes ago—is among our most human qualities. We all grow and change constantly, whether we want to or not.
Marketing didn’t get that when PRIZM was invented in 1980, and it doesn’t get it today, for the simple reason that marketing was not built for talking to people. It was built for typifying people.
Chris Locke, David Weinberger, Rick Levine, and I all thought there was hope for marketing when we wrote The Cluetrain Manifesto in 1999, because we saw the Internet as a radically new way to connect the demand and supply sides of markets directly, and personally.
But marketing instead saw the Internet as a great way to spy on people and to typify them more than ever. PRIZM persists, entrenched as ever. And conversations among customers and marketers happen in two very different and disconnected echo chambers, mostly using giant corporate platforms.
For a sense of how thoroughly disconnected those chambers are, see any of Tom Fishburne’s Marketoons. They’re brilliant and spot-on.
They also make clear—at least to me—that Cluetrain won’t prove right until marketing gets out of the way.
Which it won’t on its own. Our side—the customers’ side—needs to obsolesce it. Some of us have been working on that here since 2006, here since 2013, and here since 2017.
The image above was generated by the prompt in the caption under it, using what currently calls itself Microsoft Bing Image Creator from Designer, which persists in Microsoft’s long tradition of aversive and unmemorable names for products.
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