“There’s a lot of talk about the polarization of wealth and the shrinking of the ‘middle class.’ A sea change for companies as they market, brand and advertise has more to do with the fate of the ‘Mass Affluent,'” Joe Mont reports for MainStreet.
“A recent study by Digitas, a global integrated brand agency, found that those with a $100,000 to $199,000 household income level have all but disappeared,” Mont reports. “The study, Affluence in America: The New Consumer Landscape, was developed as a white paper for Advertising Age with Ipsos Mendelsohn, a global market research company that specializes in advertising and marketing. Mass affluence has given way to the spending power of the truly and the up-and-coming affluent — the ‘Class Affluent’ and ‘Emerging Affluent,’ it found.”
Mont reports, “The Mass Affluent, earning between $100,000 and $199,000 in household income, is rapidly being absorbed into other categories, including the Emerging Affluent, or those under the age of 35 earning $100,000 to $199,000; the Class Affluent, a growing segment with between $200,000 and $1 million HHI annually; the merely ‘Affluent,’ with between $200,000 and $499,000 HHI; the ‘Wealthy,’ with between $499,000 and $999,000 HHI; and the ‘Rich,’ with $1 million-plus HHI.”
Advertisement: Limited Time: Students, Parents and Faculty save up to $200 on a new Mac.
“Where one falls on the wealth spectrum has traditionally influenced what they buy and the brands they favor,” Mont reports. “‘My observation about brands is they start out small and focused and as they become more successful they need to incorporate a wider variety of people,’ says George Scribner, senior vice president of people planning for Digitas and the author of the study. ‘In that regard they end up defending their brand, as opposed to really championing and evolving their original reason for being.'”
Mont reports, “There are exceptions to that, however. A common denominator among the Mass Affluent, Class Affluent and Emerging Affluent: Apple is their favorite brand.”
Read more in the full article here.
More consulting rubbish. They are just trying to sell fancy reports for $1500 or something.
The common denominator of all classes of Americans is that Apple is their favorite brand.
So true!
Apple has become my favorite drug of choice. LOL
Who needs a $1500 report find out the obvious. Oh, yeah I know, college grads who need to be told what to think.
So, anyone earning $100,000 or more state, “Apple is their favorite brand.” That is great. That doesn’t mean anyone earning less than $100,000 doesn’t also believe that “Apple is their favorite brand.”
Could we just say that most homo sapiens (humans) believe “Apple is their favorite brand.” Next market will be extraterrestrials, dogs, dolphins, … Who comes up with this stuff.
Here is how you do a survey. Go out to dinner, travel on a bus, train or walk a city street. WHAT DO YOU SEE PEOPLE USING? Everything has an Apple logo on it. Survey is done.
That crowd used to be strictly windows. Nice to see they’re coming around to reality. Now if only the democrats would.
Not to mention, they’re the new “millionaire, corporate jet owning” crowd as the bar will be lowered on Thursday night’s dear leader speech to the US on what a “millionaire devil” is.
Less and less of us are “emerging affluent”
Jibberish.
We are a classless society; those who make a million this year might make nothing next year. Someone who makes $20k this year could make $200k next year. Granted, most people don’t because they are either in a career or do something “steady.” The point is that it’s possible and that is why we do not have classes of people in America.
Have you ever been to a major American city? You have your inner-city poor folks, your homeless, your urbanites, your suburban commuters, your unionized city workers, your unionized factory workers, your political leaders and your criminal underworld, both organized and otherwise. Go into the country side and see everything from subsistence farming to glorious estates.
You have classes up the ying-yang.
Uh, yeah, I’ve seen it all. You missed the point, as did those below. The point is there are no appointed classes. See India, royal families, etc. Of course there is generational wealth. There’s also generational poverty. Doesn’t mean classes.
Absolute rubbish thundervolt. Ask the children of the Kennedy or Bush or Walton or Hilton families if they expect to be living the lifestyle of a $20k/yr household. Ever. Wealth has increasingly been redistributed to the top, restricting opportunities for upward mobility.
It’s not rubbish. Wealth has been redistributed down, which increases poverty because it steals from the productive parts of society and gives it to the non-productive parts. I don’t expect you to understand this though because you’re spouting brainwashed crap.
That makes absolutely no sense.
Among the developed countries (i.e. in the Western world), America has by far the greatest disparity between the rich and poor, and it has the most clearly identifiable social classes. Compared to other developed countries, in America there is practically NO mobility between classes. If you were born into a poor family, you will die poor, your children will be poor and their children will be poor. Same for rich. Same for ‘middle class’ (whatever that is taken to mean). While America notionally represents the ‘land of opportunities’, where anyone who works hard can succeed, in reality, those are exceptional examples that represent minuscule percentage of the population.
That is patently false and you are a purveyor of multiple falsehoods. There are hundreds of stories of people who were born into dirt-poor families who made something of themselves, sometimes becoming moderately wealthy, others ridiculously wealthy. Some have even lost it all only to rebuild it all again.
Thundervolt,
Please provide one single piece of evidence to show that wealth has been redistributed “down” in the last 30 years in the US. You’re entitled to your own opinion but not your own facts.
Welfare, free breakfast at school, free education, bolstering unions, free government cellphones, on and on.
You cannot be a serious person to have made that statement.
I think you misunderstood my point. And you have not answered my question. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you might actually be open to considering this issue without the trendy objectivist goggles. “Think different,” if you will.
First, the programs you mention (x free cellphones??) merely keep poor people from becoming homeless, hungry people from starving, and Americans from becoming illiterate serfs. These government programs which “promote the general welfare” have been seen by “serious people” for over 200 years in this country to be consistent with the spirit and the letter of the constitution. Look up Washington and Madison’s work in providing government aid to the poor. Educate yourself about the importance Franklin and Jefferson placed on government provided public education (read the charter to the Univ. of Virginia). Of course these programs cost taxpayer money. But the “serious people” understand that not only do those programs provide a safety net for the least among us which is morally appropriate, they make America stronger, more productive, more sovereign, and safer. Those programs do not allow those at the bottom to accumulate “wealth,” they merely help prevent them from falling into oblivion.
You equate spending taxpayer money on programs that directly benefit lower income families to a “redistribution” of wealth “down,” and while I suppose that’s technically correct, it’s completely missing the point in the context of this thread. The point is that in the last 30 years the wealthiest Americans have grown wealthier by orders of magnitude, and the rest of America in the middle and at the bottom has seen it’s savings drained away and it’s household income slide (if they haven’t been laid off or outsourced). Sure, more money in absolute dollars is now going to safety net type programs than back in the 40s through the 80s, but that just makes my argument that there are more desperate people on the bottom. As the country’s wealth has increased, the allotment of the increase has gone disproportionately UP to the already wealthy. Here’s some idea: the top 400 families in the US today hold more wealth than the bottom 150 million families. The percentage of the wealth of America has steadily concentrated in the very top few households, and after the gap where the rapidly shrinking middle class used to be, everyone else is becoming the working poor, struggling to maintain their standard of living with less wealth. There is NO evidence to the contrary by any metric.
The significance here is that vast and growing inequality in wealth distribution (ie, how much wealth is owned by whom) diminishes social mobility, which results in a nation with rigid socioeconomic classes.
@TxDoc – This is way old, but you miss Thundervolts point: Gummint (by the People, for the People) bad, theftristocracy good.
Seriously, great post.
Think the US is awesome because we have more social mobility than those old world socialist countries? Think again:
http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/why/evidence/social-mobility
How about the “Assfluent” or those who drive BMWs and make between $135,000 and $142,000 per year.
Meaningless categorization FTW!