"Aspirational"

A good friend just sent me a very interesting piece written by Laura Martinez for Ad Age. Laura is a journalist who also keeps the excellent 'Mi blog es tu blog'. Laura tells a couple of stories, one related to how Mexican advertising tends to go 'aspirational' (i.e. portray whiter, blonder people in advertising) and another on how she was rejected to participate in a focus group, most probably because she's a successful / educated Mexican living in the US. She writes with a journalist/social commentator's sensibility. Being a marketer, I'm a lot more cynical than that.

When I worked in Mexico, we had the very handy SEL (socio-economic level) definitions. This is always the first line for segmenting markets in Mexico, at least for less sophisticated companies. The SEL definitions use letters, and it used to go from A to E (A being the highest). Nowadays, the definitions look a bit more complex: A/B, C+, C, D+, D, E. According to researchers, the breakout between socioeconomic levels works like this:

A/B 7.4%
C+ 7.2%
C 25.0%
D+ 23.5%
D 27.9%
E 9.0%

The way that researchers put people in different segments is fascinating. They use 13 variables like education, number of lightbulbs in the household, number of rooms without bathrooms, number of bathrooms with showers, and also whether you own (or not) things like cars, water heaters, vaccum cleaners, computers, microwave ovens, washing machines, toasters and VCR's. The way they define the segments themselves is also fascinating. The A/B segment, for instance, "includes those segments of the population with the higher standard of living. The head of the household will have a college degree or higher. The households in this segment are luxury apartments or houses with full services and comforts". In contrast, the E segment: "(rarely included in market research [sic]) is the lowest segment in the population. The head of household will have not completed primary education. These people [sic] don't own a place and they have to rent or otherwise manage to find somewhere to live. There's usually more than one generation living in the household,which is totally austere". You can read all about it (in Spanish) here.

Why is this information even relevant to the topic? There's a point to be made, and, as always, it boils down to economics. Just to illustrate, and according to the same data source, the A/B C+ segment, which makes 14% of the population concentrates almost 60% of income. The remaining 86% of the population keeps 40%. If you're a CPG company, however, who are you going to sell to, regardless of income levels? To 14% of the population? Or to 86%? If you want to build a decent volume level, you need to work with the larger parts of the population. Your product needs to work with the larger segment, and that's why Laura did not pass the screener for the focus group interviews.

The other side of the story concerns advertising. One time, a visiting professor I had in college told me something that stuck with me, he said: "In Mexico, you can take a look at a person's skin color and facial features, and you can estimate their social level with amazing accuracy". I thought that this was a very racist remark at the time, but after a while I was forced to concede the point. He was (kinda) right. I guess that Mexico inherited this from the social dynamics in colonial times, and while it is becoming less true as time goes by, it is still a valid observation. It sucks, I know, but I do believe that it is changing for the better. From a marketer's perspective, you want to make your product desirable, so what are you going to do when you produce an ad? What kind of imagery will work best? What kind of people do you want to show using your product? How do you make it 'aspirational'?

I'm going to leave the question open for now. I'm sure it will come back.

CB