February 2, 2007

The New Demographics: You Are Where You Live


People sometimes wonder how I can successfully design offices all over the country without setting foot out of my hometown Portland, Oregon. Now I'm revealing to you one of my "secret weapons" that I use to help me understand who your patients are. Knowing their lifestyle preferences, income, age levels and such enables me to design just the right style and color scheme that appeals to them.

My secret weapon is a website called "My Best Segments" featuring free demographic information from Claritas, a world leader in demographics and customer segment profiling. They have taken a mountain of data on consumers, filtered it into cohesive lifestyle groups and given them each a clever title like Money and Brains, Bohemian Mix, Kids & Cul-de-sacs, etc.

At the website you enter the zip code of the area you want to know about and up pops the top five groups living in that zip code. You can click on each group name to find out information like income, number of kids, favorite restaurants and TV shows, types of sports they like, even the make and model of car they are likely to drive!

Demographic characteristics such as education, housing and race/ethnicity are also available. So it's easy for me to get a good picture of the folks who are my client's typical patients and then tailor the office to fit their tastes and lifestyles. It's fun to put in your own zip code and see which group you fit into.

Think of MyBestSegments as a "photo album" of consumer markets. Each of the Claritas market segments has its own pages that display "snapshots" of the segment's demographic traits, lifestyle preferences and consumer behaviors.

Did I mention that all this great information is FREE? Try it for yourself:

http://www.claritas.com

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