A class of your own: low.

I’m an avid reader, and I have a habit of reading my girlfriend’s textbooks, especially when she’s taking classes that interest me. (This has been an excellent semester filled with MBA-type stuff including investment strategy, financial statement analysis, project management, and marketing.) And that’s how I started reading a particular textbook on Consumer Behavior.

The book opens: The field of consumer behavior is the study of individuals, groups, or organizations and the processes they use to select, secure, use and dispose of products, services, experiences, or ideas to satisfy needs and the impacts that these processes have on the consumer and society.

Good marketers will realize I’ve grossly generalized here, but non-marketers needn’t be overwhelmed with too-detailed information to understand one general point: Businesses have an incentive to know as much as possible about people, because they can then create advertising that is compelling. The more narrow (or targeted) the group advertised to, the more compelling the message can be. Knowing how to identify groups is the art of marketing.

The basics of consumer behavior are what you might expect intuitively, and the broadest groups are easily identified. Immigrants make decisions differently than those people who have been assimilated. Men are different than women. Age matters. Location matters. Family structure matters. Lots of things matter, lots of groups can be segmented from any broader population, but the important pieces of information that marketers must know concern how those things matter, or rather how they affect the consumer’s decision-making and purchasing behaviors. This book does a good job outlining what to consider when targeting certain groups (or demographics).

But guess what else matters? Income, and by association, class. You might have guessed that, but I’m willing to bet that you don’t know how if you’ve never studied marketing. And the how is interesting. In the section on income, this book went into some detail. It segmented the US population into 5 primary income/class groups: upper, upper-middle, middle, lower-middle, and lower. It provided a few paragraphs about each, suggesting what their incomes likely were, what the source likely was, and the types of services those people might be interested in.

And then the awesome happened. Following the descriptions of the income/class brackets, the book stated that it was going to show 5 example ads, each of which was targeted to one of the preceding class descriptions.

I flipped, read, and counted. I was amused. Pleased with myself, I identified with the first ad immediately. The ad, for a travel agency, showed a couple sipping wine in a hot tub outside of a beautiful island resort hotel. It was a “classic” vacation ad, and I even made a mental note to confirm I had enough PTO to visit the place. The second ad, for Lowe’s, is targeted toward middle-class homeowners. That group has a strong desire for value. They choose careers in things like education, sales, and semi-skilled factory positions. And, naturally, their incomes reflect that. The third ad was for simple sporting goods and work wear, which is targeted toward the middle-lower income group. The fourth ad was for rent-to-own services and questionable short-term educational opportunities. It was supposedly speaking to lower-income individuals.

Four ads.

I flipped.

Nothing.

The book said there were five groups, and I was so engaged in the ultimate point—that each group aspires to its respective position rather than being limited to it—that I was determined to figure out how I could’ve missed one. I flipped to the beginning of the section. I flipped through to the fourth ad. Back and forth, back and forth, I must’ve looked for at least two full minutes.

And then it hit me. I literally could not see the upper-class ad. It wasn’t an ad at all! I mean, who buys a 400′ yacht?!

Upper class people do. Upper class people see the world differently than anyone else, as do all of the income groups, and it isn’t income that makes that true. It’s the perception and view of the world that make the income, not the other way around.

That’s some crazy shit. I plan to think about that next month during my vacation to Hawaii—if I have enough time off.