A New Decade, A New Census
My summer job in 1980 was as a census enumerator for the U.S. Census Bureau, a position that involved visiting homes of people that had failed to return their census form or had for whom the information was incomplete. It was a fun job (other than the occasional run-in with aggressive family pets) and it paid well: I was compensated for each completed census form, as well as for completing certain other tasks.
Another aspect of the job was verifying the existence of homes. The area I grew up in was undergoing a major housing boom and large tracts of land had been subdivided and already had been assigned a postal address. In many cases, there were no actual houses yet, so I would dutifully note this on the forms I submitted.
For marketers, census data is a part of the data we manage about markets, prospects, and customers. If we want to understand the demographics of a market, our analysis will rely heavily on information derived from the Census. Census data or attributes derived from this data (such as "lifestyle clusters") is appended to many customer databases to provide additional variables for reporting and analysis. And a good number of vendors make their living by reselling, repackaging, and augmenting the base data.
This year's census form contains only 10 questions (a sample can viewed here), and focuses really on household composition, age, sex, and ethnicity. Many of the detailed attributes we associate with census data is collected via the American Community Survey, which is an ongoing survey conducted each year against a sample of the population. Back when I was a census taker, the ten-year census had a short form and a long form; the short form was still lengthy compared with today's survey and the long form was analogous to the American Community Survey.
The forms are now in the mail to American households, and the Bureau expects about 70 million forms to be returned, leaving many others that will need to be gathered by census takers. Once the data is collected and analyzed, all sorts of things will flow from it. First there will be the predictable debate about over- or under-counting: the census tends to over-count the affluent, especially those that own multiple homes, and it under-counts minorities and non-citizens. States may gain or lose congressional seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and census data will guide congressional redistricting, which may represent one of the most creative uses of demographic data.
Marketers will be using it to understand more about markets and customers and eventually to target consumers for marketing, a use of the census that I doubt the writers of the U.S. constitution foresaw when they wrote: "The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first
Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every
subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law
direct." But then that is true of so many things that have taken place since the first census in 1790, which covered thirteen states and resulted in an estimated official population of 3,929,214.
Posted at 12:49PM Jan 04, 2010
by David King in General |
