the.com/demographics
The stats that explain why ads keep calling you 'young adult' at 40.
means The measurable traits of a population — age, income, gender, location, and the like — used to describe or target groups of people.
from Built from Greek 'demos' (the people, as in democracy) plus '-graphy/-graphics' (writing or description, as in photography). So literally 'description of the people' — a 19th-century coinage for the then-new science of counting populations, which marketers later borrowed to sort you into a bracket.
- origin
- Greek for people-writing, literally describing crowds
- marketing use
- Used to sort you into buckets before you buy anything
- trap
- Averages hide wild variation within every group
- destiny myth
- Predicts tendencies, not individuals, despite confident headlines