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Source: Demographics 97

considered “representative” behavior. The teenagers would, of
course, continue to behave like teenagers. But that would again be
dismissed as the way teenagers behave rather than as the constitutive
values and behavior of society. And so one could predict with near-
certainty, for instance (and some of us did predict it), that by the mid-
seventies the college campuses would cease to be “activist” and
“rebellious,” and college students would again be concerned with
grades and jobs; but also that the overwhelming majority of the
“dropouts” of 1968 would, ten years later, have become the “upward-
mobile professionals” concerned with careers, advancement, tax shel-
ters, and stock options.
Segmentation by educational attainment may be equally impor-
tant; indeed, for some purposes, it may be more important (e.g., sell-
ing encyclopedias, continuing professional education, but also vaca-
tion travel). Then there is labor force participation and occupational
segmentation. Finally there is income distribution, and especially dis-
tribution of disposable and discretionary income. What happens, for
instance, to the propensity to save in the two-earner family?
Actually, most of the answers are available. They are the stuff of
market research. All that is needed is the willingness to ask the ques-
tions.
But more than poring over statistics is involved. To be sure, statis-
tics are the starting point. They were what got Melville to ask what
opportunities the jump in teenagers offered a fashion retailer, or what
got the top management at Sears, Roebuck to look upon Latin
America as a potential market. But then the managements of these
companies—or the administrators of metropolitan big-city universi-
ties such as Pace in New York and Golden Gate in San Francisco—
went out into the field to look and listen.
This is literally how Sears, Roebuck decided to go into Latin
America. Sears’s chairman, Robert E. Wood, read in the early 1950s
that Mexico City and São Paulo were expected to outgrow all U.S.
cities by the year 1975. This so intrigued him that he went himself to
look at the major cities in Latin America. He spent a week in each of
them—Mexico City, Guadalajara, Bogota, Lima, Santiago, Rio, São
Paulo—walking around, looking at stores (he was appalled by what
he saw), and studying traffic patterns. Then he knew what customers
to aim at, what kind of stores to build, where to put the stores, and
what merchandise to stock them with.
Similarly, the founders of Club Mediterranée looked at the custom-