History by Magazine -- Crunching the numbers for profit and fun
American Demographics looks in the data for trends and Married Woman celebrates the joys of being married. My weekly take on America's news, culture and ideas -- from exactly 30 years ago.
Figures, cool facts, and fun numbers
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Jan. 20, 1994
Numbers. Numbers. Numbers.
American Demographics, a marketing magazine that exists to sniff out consumer trends for businesses, is a number-cruncher's delight, full of census figures, market surveys, rankings and forecasts.
It crawls with tables of statistical data and bar graphs. It's sprinkled with per capita factoids about how this or that lifestyle or age subgroup behaves.
Or that one in four of America's 3 to 4 million Muslims is black.
Or how much money the average hunter spent in 1991 on hunting gear ($233).
Or that Nevada has the highest rate of residents without health insurance (22.7 percent) and Hawaii the lowest (6 percent).
Yet, incredibly, number-happy American Demographics is not only not boring, it is full of visually pleasing, accessibly written stuff.
It's of interest to those who've never heard of such inside-marketing lingo as "geocoding" or "segmentation model" and never want their children to, either.
January's cover story is on America's Arab-American market — 870,000 people who, surprise, don't quite fit the media-mongered stereotype.
According to the marketing company exec who wrote the piece, Arab-Americans are more educated, younger and more affluent than the average American, and they are likely to hold sales jobs and be executives and entrepreneurs. Number-wise, Pittsburgh ranks 12th among cities with 12,141 Arab-Americans. Detroit is No. 1, with 61,000.
Along with reports on "Why Wives Earn Less Than Husbands" and "The Gender Gap at the PC Keyboard," American Demographics offers "Change Leaders and the New Media," a feature really for business marketing execs only.
"Change leaders," by the way, are defined as "consumer explorers" who embrace and popularize innovative new products like interactive television or online computer services that eventually will become accepted by the mainstream.
Those wacky marketing folks are famous for coming up with new handles like "change leaders" for their newly discovered consumer segments.
In "Attitude (Not Age) Defines the Mature Market," you can find out how one demographer-marketer has segmented (carved up) the mature market (people over 50) according to peoples' attitudes and behaviors, rather than according to race, age, income, etc.
Thus, in the Self category (how older people regard themselves), for example, we find four segments you may or may not recognize: "The Upbeat Enjoyer," the "Insecure," the "Threatened Active" and the "Financial Positive."
In addition to a lot of worthwhile, informative and practical facts, there is much humorous ore to be mined in American Demographics.
It might be the perfect place to look for a strange-and-trendy name for your new rock group. And if you own a TV station or a newspaper, it might do you some good in your financial coffers to know that 58 percent of the "Insecure" segment of older Americans is devoted to network-TV watching while 27 percent of "Financial Positives" prefer newspapers.
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It's hard to believe, but until last week there were 13 bridal magazines out there to help the pre-married become nuptialized, yet not one magazine for young women who were already married.
Well, Rupert Murdoch's intraplanetary multimedia empire has come to the rescue with Married Woman.
The new every-other-monthly's intention is to celebrate the joys of marriage, humorously and honestly.
Each issue will spotlight a celebrity couple's marriage, like the debut's cover profile of rocking Rod Stewart and Rachel Hunter (which is mostly an overlong, 70-percent-inane interview with Hunter).
Otherwise, Married Woman offers an array of columns (on cars, entertaining, beauty and men's grooming) and articles (on mothers-in-law, religion in marriage, sex, etc.) that seem to do what they are intended to do — point out the good, the bads and the in-betweens of married life.
There's even a horoscope that recognizes that the reader is a married person, which is apparently seen as a breakthrough in the field of astrology.