Tuesday, October 28, 2003

DM to seniors. What is important.

KnowledgeBase Marketing (a subsidiary of Young & Rubican) sells a list of contact details of US seniors (individuals over 50). I thought the opening sales pitch was a bit uninspired ‘…Freed from the constraints of raising a family and with more time of their own, mature consumers seek products, services and activities that complement their desire to live life to the fullest…’. Anyway, it was not the quality of the sales copy that caught my eye.

The source of the database is the 2000 Census and contains a staggering 98,000,000 names.

What I found interesting was the demographic items that can be used to create targeted list and the differing premiums charged for these criteria.

These are criteria in decreasing order of costs.

Race (most expensive)
Children’s presence in the household by age
Mail order buyer

There then followed a group of criteria with similar premiums (home owner, corrective lens wearer, ethnic code, home owner, and number of children).

The least expensive targeting criteria were marital status and median net worth.

As marketers I think we can read a lot into this list since it shows the relative importance of market segmentation factors.

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