One of the pleasures of writing this blog is the interaction and great suggestions we receive from our readers. This morning I received an email from Eric Frenchman (check out Eric’s blog here) with an intriguing question. Eric is a big Springsteen fan and was wondering if the Boss’ new folksy direction and album, “We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions” released earlier this year has affected his fan base.
To answer the question using the Hitwise Lifestyle Tool (a service we provide that relies on the Claritas Prizm segmentation), I took a look at the psychographic breakdown of visitors to Backstreets.com, a Springsteen fan site from last year (4 weeks ending July 30, 2005) and this year (4 weeks ending July 29, 2006). First last year.
Social Groups, www.backstreets.com, 4 weeks ending 7/30/05

This chart shows the index of visitors to this fan site by where people live. The U’s correspond to urban groups, the S groups are suburban, the C groups are small cities, and T’s are towns and rural areas. The group numbers reflect level of affluence with 1′s being most affluent and 3 & 4′s least affluent. Given that, if we look at visitors to Backstreet.com last year, the highest indexing group was U3, the “Urban Cores.” which given the high concentration of blue-collar urban dwellers would make sense.
If we change our focus to our most recent data for July this year (three months since the release of Bruce’s folksy album), we see an entirely different breakdown of visitors…
Social Groups, www.backstreets.com, 4 weeks ending 7/29/06

Now with a folksy direction, visitors to Backstreets.com are indexing highest from S1, the affluent suburbanite group known as the “Elite Suburbs”, and U2 the “Midtown Mix” confirming that yes, there does seem to be an indication based on this particular site that Bruce is attracting an entirely different audience.
From a business perspective, this highlights how dynamic demographics can be. The days of relying on a demographic survey you conducted two years ago are over. In addition, understanding how demographics and psychographics can swing given changes in direction are invaluable insights for us marketers. Thanks Eric for a great question. If anyone else has an interesting thought respond via the comments to this post. If I can find interesting insight in the data, i’ll follow-up with a post.