by: Dick Stroud
When Robert Worcester, the founder of MORI, writes something, it is worth reading. In this brief article he explains, in words of one syllable, the idiocy of using the Internet to target older (and not so older) poorer people.
Look at the analysis. Less than one in ten of the 65+ who are in the DE socio-economic group have access to the Internet.
Look at it another way. If you are an AB, in the 55-64 year age group, you are more likely to be online than anybody aged 15-34 in socio economic groups C2DE and only 6% different from anybody in the C1 group. Remember that in this case socio-economic group is a proxy for the level of person's education. Education above everything else determines Internet connection.
Original Post: http://www.20plus30.com/blog/2007/10/its-all-about-socio-economic-group.html
The point of this blog posting was not to promote socio-economic groupings as a means of market segmentation but to illustrate the nonsense of attempting to describe internet use on the basis of age - other than for the 65+.
I am certain there are anomalies with the socio-economic group definitions but I reckon it is a pretty good proxy for educational attainment.
I think what's striking is that the age differences are at least as big than socio-economic differences - which is relatively unusual.
For isntance a young DE person is more likely to have access than an old AB person.
Social groups are not a proxy for education, but a description of job function - ABC1's jobs tend to be office based, where as C2DE's jobs tend to be more manually skill based. The difference probably reflects the role of the computer in performing everyday job functions. Remember that a retired CEO or Judge is classified in the E grouping. These sort of classifications are pretty useless for a marketeer in a world much changed since they were introduced.