The Branding of Social Classes

How do we recognize the social status of someone walking down the street? By their appearance—their clothes, shoes, handbags, accessories, car. But only because of brands. If all of these things went without labels, it would be a little more difficult to know how much they cost or where they were bought. And frankly, it really wouldn’t matter. We love to express our membership in a certain class (particularly higher) by purchasing brand name things that are unanimously expensive. And we love to judge and make assumptions about people accordingly. Think about it. . . you probably already have a map in your head that enables you to associate every brand with a store, price, certain people, or impression. Here are some of the ones that I can think of:

Upper class
• Burberry
• Louis Vuttion
• Christian Louboutian
• Chanel
• Mercedes
• Tiffany

Middle Class
• American Eagle
• Nike
• Toyota
• H&M

Low Class
• Jordache
• Route 66
• Rusted, older car
• Payless

Aging America

America is getting older. And while I have read several articles about how marketing is shifting toward the utilization of non-traditional media due to new technologies, I’m not sure this will be effective in the baby boomer population. Turning to YouTube, Facebook, and targeted consumer advertising is conducive to Generation X, but these same internet gurus are not necessarily spending money. The technology era has not leaked into the lives of our parents in the same way it has taken over ours. In fact, many of them still read the printed newspaper, watch TV with commercials, and don’t even know what Facebook is.

Companies are smart to introduce marketing strategies that reach out to the younger people (since we are the consumers of the near future). However, there seems to be a “cut-off” in the population and those that were born before a certain date have managed to avoid using computers and other electronics for entertainment and those born after have integrated every aspect of the innovations into their daily lives. If the marketing trend is shifting toward the younger of the two, but the older group is the one growing in size, we might say that marketing is moving backwards.

Class Effect on Health

The AMS Review article made me giggle. Of course health is affected by social class—not by the label of the class itself, but because of the characteristics of individuals within the class. I have a HUGE issue with the impact of this on public health, policies, and government’s spending of healthcare dollars. My argument is best explained and understood through an example:

1. Patient on Medicaid= low-class, poverty, disabled, etc.
Social class traits:

• Poor parents
• Bad home life growing up
• Lack of values and respect (for self and others)
• Less education
• low income
  

2. Poor health
Causes related to social class:

• Not taught how to properly care for self
• Restricted access to healthcare (money, knowledge)
• Unhealthy lifestyle
  

3. Receive state medical benefits

• Abuse healthcare system
• Don’t follow through with medical orders and treatments
• Drug aversion
• Treating, not preventing
  

4. Consequences of social class traits:

• Young, multiple, single-parent pregnancies
• Receive and spend more healthcare dollars
• Children born into same social class
  

5. Cycle continues

Fault for this vicious, class effect on health is multi-factorial. We can blame the patients themselves for not giving a damn, the education system for lack of education and enforcement, government for providing insurance coverage to the welfare mommy’s 5th child instead of mandating and paying for birth control. Whatever the cause, it doesn’t matter, because we will never eliminate health inequality between social classes until there are radical changes in our healthcare system and approach to care.

VALS

VALS™ is a marketing and consulting tool that helps businesses worldwide develop and execute more effective strategies. The system identifies current and future opportunities by segmenting the consumer marketplace on the basis of the personality traits that drive consumer behavior. VALS applies in all phases of the marketing process, from new-product development and entry-stage targeting to communications strategy and advertising. The basic tenet of VALS is that people express their personalities through their behaviors.

So basically, it is behavioral interviewing and used to find the root cause of WHY people buy things. VALS blames motivation to purchase on personality traits. If companies focus on the reason for consumer behaviors, they can segment the market and focus marketing to the specific personalities with buying power.

The VALS survey categorizes people into 1 of 8 “VALS Type” based on their answers:


My primary VALS Type is EXPERIENCER and secondary is INNOVATER. According to VALS, the primary represents my dominant life approach and secondary represents a particular emphasis I give to my dominant approach. I agreed with most of the statements about my personality; however I thought that the descriptions make very bold statements about my consumer behaviors based on very generalized questions. I also feel that people have a preconceived notion about themselves (myself included) and a vision of what they want to be that might influence how I answered. Although I tried to be as honest as possible, maybe my personality is suppressing my true feelings. Being an analytical person, it is hard for me to believe the reliability and validity of psychological surveys. Observation of consumers would provide more truthful and accurate results, but would also require more resources and time.

Thoughts on the VALS theory:

Positives	Negatives
Quick assessment of consumers in market	Questions that determine each category focused on 1 behavior
Questions related to behaviors, not thoughts	Scale of 4- doesn’t encompass exact feelings, no choice of exemption
Pre-determined segmentation	Types seem to reflect Myers-Briggs with different titles
Compares VALS Types to geographic distribution	Selection bias and convenience sampling
	Underlying variables of geographic distribution of personalities
	Very strong words in questions- immediately affect emotion and attitude
	Response bias- perceptions about self, society, and our ideals

Consumer Markets: Allegheny Co.- 2000

Since taking a Sociology of Marriage class in undergrad, I tend to look at populations with bias toward the difficulty of college students to meet a life-long partner in this city. 40% of the population is either under 18 or over 65. When you factor in 45-64 year olds (who are either already married or considered too old for a relationship with a college student), that makes a majority, 60%, ineligible. At first glimpse, the age distribution may seem favorable to college-aged women since they tend to date up in age, since the median is 35.7. However, this is a case of misuse of statistics. When searching for a mate, or targeting consumers of your business, the more important parameters are mean age group and age distribution. The exact age is irrelevant. Businesses don’t market toward one specific age, so the graphical representation of age classes is much more useful.

A lot of these statistics seem very vague and I find it hard to generalize the characteristics of any age group.