Greens and their machines…
Filed in: General News, It's hard being green, Mapping Software
January 12, 2012
I had a pleasant but quiet holiday. But… being Beacon Dodsworth’s token ‘green’, I was worrying too much about the environment and climate change, particularly about the reports of methane bubbling from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf as reported by Natalia Shakhova and Igor Semiletov. It is not yet clear how the findings from their recent trip will be reported when it gets into the peer reviewed journals… But that’s another story.
I decided to lighten up my mood and browse through Kantar’s Target Group Index (TGI) a product we have recently taken on to allow us to combine demographics with attitudes and branded goods analysis. My interest was to investigate how difficult it is for those with green attitudes to keep to their principles. In this instance I decided to look at transport fuel use and question the assumption that ‘green people use less transport fuel’. Using the TGI with our P² People & Places demographic classification, allowed me to identify those demographic groups that have the greenest attitudes and make some estimate of how their lifestyles matched up.
The highest proportion of those professing green attitudes turned out to be the P² branches representing urban professionals and student groups:
E08 – Urban Professionals – have one car with a powerful engine but are likely to travel to work by train
E18 – Capital Apartments – live in London. Most have no car and travel to work by train
On average these branches are over three times as likely to class themselves as green as other branches and they tend to live in the central areas of towns and major cities…
NOTE: The darker the green, the higher the concentration of Urban Professionals (E08)
The Rural Comfort branch (B04) has a similar wealth pattern to the Urban Professionals although when we drill down we see they are slightly more asset rich and have a slightly lower level of disposable income due to the higher number of families and older people in this demographic.
Interestingly, despite their higher disposable income, the Urban Professionals use just over half the amount of transport fuel than those in the Rural Comfort branch. In Yorkshire the Rural Comfort Branch live mostly in the rural areas away from public transport so it is not surprising that most households have at least two cars, which are often large and powerful.
NOTE: The darker the blue the greater the concentration of the Rural Comfort branch (B04).
In short then, as expected, the green groups use rather less fuel for transport than similarly wealthy demographics. Whether this is due to their green principles or simply due to where they choose to live is yet to be seen. Next time I’m going to look at foreign holidays and air travel amongst these demographics and see if this will help further shed some light on the question.
In the meantime, check out our P² profiler app and see what type of people your neighbours / customers are…
Posted by Geoff Beacon, Chairman at Beacon Dodsworth.
