The Background and Development of Urban Behaviours

The methodology was designed through a combination of highly qualitative research and quantitative modelling across 1,000 consumers. From the outset there was no pre-determined plan with how the methodology or typologies would be created – in fact it was by no means certain that typologies would be created at all! The underlying philosophy was the understanding of ‘lifestyle’. The need was to create a method of understanding lifestyle and to map it in such a way that handles the issues of complexity and fluidity that lie at the heart of explaining behaviour amongst this varied group. Too many times had we heard the common complaint that traditional methods of segmentation were increasingly failing to predict or explain behaviour and consumption!

The difficulty was that the concept of ‘lifestyle’ is huge – there are so many aspects that make it up, that unless you have an overriding ‘frame’ to guide thinking, you quickly get drawn into very specific issues.

Due to the principle and philosophy of what we were trying to achieve, the research process was deliberately kept very ‘open’, undefined and in this way ‘emergent’. Initially we interviewed a range of people in their homes, exploring their lifestyles and why they chose to live them in that way – the influences on their decisions as well as what they did. This began to show the complexity and the changing nature of their lives – how they behaved differently across different days or times of the week, depending on what they were doing.

The next stage of the research was to begin to try to draw themes of thought together in a more explicit manner. To enable a more explicit illustration of what we were seeing we then held a series of focus groups. The topic guide of these followed a similar pattern to the ethnographic interviews except we now asked each participant to draw a picture of their lifestyle on a particular day of the week – how they spend their time, their lifestyle. These pictures are the best illustration of how varied lifestyle can be.

Alongside these focus groups we continued a deeper phase of ethnography, interviewing smaller groups of (2-3) similar people in different locations such as pubs or restaurants – this helped draw out in a very real way the influence of location and context introduced above.

As always with our quantitative studies, we then formulated a series of theories and hypotheses that could be tested through a number of questions. The survey was then conducted across 1,000 consumers aged between 15 and 35 and living in the central urban districts of eight large cities. We then modelled the data on the key variables of motivation, time and space – those that were highlighted throughout all of the earlier qualitative research.

The result was a model that gave each individual consumer a ‘life score’, which identified them within one of 6 typologies. The typologies were then tested across a range of different uses – analysing the demographic, socio-economic profile of the groups, their consumption of media and their consumption of more specific areas such as music, food or entertainment. Other modules of questions contrasted their attitudes to their city, to political and religious aspects of their life and their attitude to different brands.

The typologies provide a rich and deep understanding of lifestyle explained in a practical and relevant manner.