- Hardcover: 384 pages
- Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; First Edition- First Printing edition (Jan 2000)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0316929204
- ISBN-13: 978-0316929202
- Product Dimensions: 24.2 x 19.6 x 2.9 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,925,525 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Synopsis
Explores how businesses and bureaucrats use clustering systems to influence our opinions and choices.
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First Sentence
At first glance, Berwyn, Illinois, resembles many of the close-in suburbs of chicago, a settled middle-class community of beige brick bungalows known as a gateway for immigrants. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
At first glance, Berwyn, Illinois, resembles many of the close-in suburbs of chicago, a settled middle-class community of beige brick bungalows known as a gateway for immigrants. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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13 reviews
41 of 42 people found the following review helpful
Seductively interesting
20 Oct 2000
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
I never thought I would find this book as fascinating as it turns out to be. I first saw it on a friend's coffee table, and started paging through it. Then I had to borrow it. The next thing I knew, I was buying a copy for myself. Michael Weiss writes about a demographic analysis technique which explains a strange thing I noticed 20 years ago. I had moved from a a neighborhood full of 20-something recent college graduates in entry-level professional jobs into a tiny little used-to-be-the-butler's-apartment in a very ritzy neighborhood in San Francisco. All of a sudden my junk mail changed. Instead of credit card offers and Book-of-the-Month Club shills, I started getting letters that said things like "We know all about you. When you want to get away for the weekend, you shun Paris and go right to Morocco." Right.
This book explains what had happened to me: I had moved from one cluster's neighborhood into another. My address now suggested things about my income, lifestyle and assets that just weren't true.
The maps and prose in this book combine to provide a very interesting analysis of how wealth, values and lifestyle are dispersed in this country (and around the world). Clustering was first developed as a marketing tool, and it's undoubtedly a powerful one, but the book works as social commentary, as well. This book is one of the best case studies I've ever laid eyes on of how to make statistical analysis meaningful to the average reader.
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful
Fun and entertaining
19 July 2000
Format:Hardcover
I read Michael Weiss' first book-"The Clustering of America" years ago, so when I read about his latest-I bought it as well. It is a real fun read-not just statistics etc..., but a lot of fun facts about people and their purchasing habits. My town was actually classified in the book as "Executive Suites" which made it even more interesting to read.(Pretty accurate description as well) Michael Weiss also used Berwyn, Ill. as an example of "Big City Blend" and he hit the nail on the head there. ( I have some older relatives who live in Berwyn). I started by flipping back and forth in the book, then just settled down and read it all the way through. I like demographics, and marketing, so that is another reason it held my interest. There were some surprises-ex: Price Club is popular with the "Blue Blood Estates". There is also some mention of foreign countries, and how they use the cluster system in marketing. The descriptions of the clusters are interesting, and take current events into account. It is a good book just to keep around to flip through to try and find communities you are familar with and see if the descriptions hold true, or read it all the way through. Either way-it's entertaining.
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful
See the USA 62 Ways
10 Aug 2000
Format:Hardcover
This book is great fun. It centers around the idea of the "lifestyle cluster"--that there are people in your community who share your consumption patterns, what you eat, drink, smoke (if you still do!), how you vote, etc. Marketers need to know this stuff in an age of "narrowcasting" so they don't try to sell cruises to folks who can't afford them, conduct NPR pledge drives among people who resist them, hawk magazines to people who won't read them, etc.
Using massive amounts of data the author has come up with 62 of these lifestyle clusters and each of us belongs to one of them, from the richie-rich "Blueblood Estates" (think lifestyles of the rich and famous) all the way down to "Southside City" (so poor even federally subsidized highrises are better off). See where you and your allegedly classless Americans are--and see how many lifestyle options there are for a family living on, say, $40,000 a year. Where you live determines how you live, and vice versa.
There are also chapters devoted to lifestyle clusters in other countries, most notably in Canada. (Note to English Canadians: you don't have to worry about us Yanks imposing our lifestyle clusters on you. You have your own clusters to worry about.)
If you're really interested in this, look up Weiss's 1988 book, THE CLUSTERING OF AMERICA, which is a prequel to this one, and contains 40 lifestyle clusters. (I find 40 clusters easier to get my mind around than 62, frankly.) You can track the USA's progression from a production to an information society, notice which segments are gaining and which are losing strength, where racial harmony has occurred, and so on.
I am sorry that Weiss got rid of the cluster called "Coalburg and Corntown" between the 1988 book and the new one. John Cougar Mellencamp comes from a Coalburg and Corntown (Seymour, Indiana), and I always thought it would make a great title for one of his songs.
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