You Are Where You Live

"I am not a target market," runs one of the slogans in Douglas Coupland's "Generation X." It's a safe bet that Coupland's underemployed late-twentysomethings living in self-imposed exile in the desert, and the X-ers who followed their adventures, would have something to say about the demographics site You Are Where You Live. Like that it's only one step away from We Know Where You Live. Or that there's something very reductive about grouping people into narrow subcultures based on what they're likely to consume.

Now that we've all had a good laugh at the winsome idealism of those then-18-to-27-year-olds, it's time to ask ourselves, what target market are we? Once you've moved beyond the no-brainer categories like DINKs and soccer moms, what else is there? The answer, it turns out, is only five keystrokes away.

You Are Where You Live is a neat little demographics tool created by Claritas Express, a company that describes itself as "the nation's premier provider of marketing information resources and solutions for a wide range of organizations." It tells you, based on your ZIP code, what the five major "segments" or "clusters" in your area are, using two different "precision tools," PRIZM and MicroVision. Both tools claim to be based on 1990 census data and more current demographic research. The results are alternately eerily accurate and bizarrely out of touch.

My current ZIP code, 02141, covers an area on the east side of Cambridge, Massachusetts. It's home to students, recent graduates, young families, and senior citizens who live mostly in solidly built older three-apartment houses that are set right up to the sidewalk. According to PRIZM, it's home to "Young Literati," "American Dreams," "Urban Achievers," "Old Yankee Rows" and "Single City Blues." All of which probably requires further explanation for the non-demographer crowd.

Young Literati seems self-explanatory enough, as well as a common 02141 fixture — except for what YAWYL's idea of a Young Literatus is. According to PRIZM, a member of this group will be a formally dressed man with flesh-colored Bart Simpson hair and round glasses reading the first page of a blue hardcover book in front of a generic cityscape.

The non-cartoon information about this cluster is just as perplexing. Young Literati are between the ages of 25 and 44. They "take vitamins." They "use a discount broker." They "read GQ." They don't, apparently, discuss the merits of "The Body Artist" over chai lattes.

The other categories include "established urban immigrant families," "empty-nest middle-class families," and "ethnically-mixed urban singles," all of which seem pretty accurate. But if none of my aspiring-literati acquaintances reads GQ, why should I believe that my empty-nest-family neighbors, or, in fact, any people in the U.S., "believe ad campaigns," "watch bowling," and "read Spin"?

And many of their other segments stretch the imagination as much as the idea of rock-criticism-following, bowling-watching, ad-believing parents of adult children. There's "Bohemian Mix," a group represented by a goateed, green-beret-wearing man with fluffy black hair and a completely horizontal monobrow standing in front of a yellow awning that doesn't appear to be attached to anything. He may or may not be a big Ginsberg fan, but we know he reads Elle, buys his clothes at the Gap, and has "a rollover IRA."

But when you type in 02139, the Cambridge ZIP immediately to the west of 02141 that contains MIT and a slightly hipper dot-com crowd, it starts to look like there's something to this scheme — 02139 is inhabited by almost the same groups as 02141, except it includes something called "Towns and Gowns," described as "college town singles" with expensive computers and school loans. It's a subtle distinction, well-articulated in the language of demographics, and one that we can only hope will help sell many subscriptions to Elle and Spin in the future.

— Julia Lipman (julia@flakmag.com)