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This afternoon in a discussion about culture and sub-culture some marketing student ponce dismissed culture and sub-culture as demographics. Nope, don’t agree with that trivialisation at all – and here’s why.

Demographics tell you a broad brush about which people live in a geographic area, their incomes, their ethnicity, their whatever. Demographics tell you a little about a lot of people and we can use those demographic features to identify social trends and other nuances about sections of society – for example, certain suburbs have a lot of low income single parents without work.

Culture and sub-culture in society drills deeper into the core belief systems and make-up of people. A particular citizen of Sandy Bay in Hobart would have an entirely different culture from a bogun citizen in Clarendonvale. This is not a superficial demographic description of Clarendonvale against the general population – culture includes the external components of physical structures, language, rituals and ceremonies, and stories and legends. But it also includes those underlying values, beliefs and assumptions.

A bogun is not just demographically different from the yacht clubbing Sandy Bay resident. The difference falls to their underlying belief systems, and the actual world they inhabit. And this is a huge factor that has to be taken into consideration when fitting people into your organisation or when you’re trying to market to segments. The misconception that everyone who was born and raised in the same city or State is therefore of the same culture is a flawed assumption. Different cultures, and sub-cultures, have their own stories and legends, language, and rituals. It’s not that some unemployed boguns make bad decisions, it’s that they are often making decisions in the context of their own culture – whether or not to abuse a policeman, for example.

Don’t for a second believe we all live in the same world with the same rationale and societal infrastructure. Culture, my friends, makes us interesting.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 15th, 2009 at 8:17 pm and is filed under business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.