Social Class and Lifestyles

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Social Class and Lifestyles

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Social Class
• Social class refers to overall rank of people in a society
• There are different classes and each class has some different
consumption patterns
Components of Social Class:
Two major components of social class: occupation and income
Occupation:
• A typical ranking includes a variety of professional and business
occupations at the top (e.g., CEO of a large corporation,
physician, and college professor); whereas jobs that hover near
the bottom include shoe shiner, ditch digger, and garbage
collector
• A person’s occupation links strongly to his or her use of leisure
time, allocation of family resources, aesthetic preferences, and

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Social Class
Income:
• The distribution of wealth is of great interest to marketers
because it determines which groups have the greatest buying
power and market potential.
• Wealth is unevenly distributed among the classes
• People who have had money for long time tend to use it
differently than who acquired it recently through their hard work
Targeting the top of pyramid: High income consumers
Many marketers try to target affluent upscale consumers, as they
have resources to spend on costly products with higher profit
margins

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Social Class
Targeting the Bottom of the pyramid: Low income consumers
• Marketers largely ignore this segment
• However poor people have same basic needs and spend more
than average on food, rent and health care.
• Market size is huge
• Hence companies tap this market by improving their distribution
system and making their products simpler and less expensive
• For example sachets of products.

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Social Class
How do we measure Social Class:
Education and income measures can be used
Generic classification of Social Class:
1. Upper Upper
2. Lower Upper
3. Upper Middle
4. Lower Middle
5. Upper Lower
6. Lower Lower

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Socio Economic Classification (SEC) of
Pakistan

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Social Class
• Social Capital: It refers to your organizational affiliations and
networks
• For example: Professional who play golf and conduct a lot of
business on greens
• This makes rich different
• Purchase pattern of people with high social class tend to be
different from those with low social class and similar among
same organization/ network

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Lifestyle
• Students at same university coming from similar background
have different consumption choices
• Lifestyle defines a pattern of consumption that reflects person’s
choices of how to spend his or her time and money
• Time means how much time we have available to do what we
like to do and what we choose to do in that time
• Consumers pursue products to enjoy their lives and express
themselves in desirable social settings. Hence advertisers
associate a product with social situation like family barbecue,
trip to northern areas etc.

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Lifestyle
• There are set of products and services which are associated with
specific lifestyle
• Many people now evaluate products not just in terms of function
but also in terms of how well they coordinates with other objects
like clothes
• Co-branding strategies are used where companies team up to
promote two or more items for example sprite and olper doodh
soda

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Lifestyle
• Marketers use psychographics to understand lifestyle and
personalities.
• For example psychographics research attempts to group
consumers based on three categories of variables: AIOS;
activities, interests and opinions.