The Big Sort (28 page)

Marketers also discovered geographies of culture or lifestyle. Chris Riley is a Portland, Oregon, marketing expert who worked with Nike in the 1990s. The sporting goods company was unique, Riley told me, because it had largely abandoned standard demographic market research. The company had found that "people [were] clustering around their interests" and those clusters had little to do with standard demographic categories. Nike also had recognized a "geography of influence" in the market. Depending on the subject, belief, or product involved, each interest, Riley explained, had its own map. "If you go down to Mount Hood [outside Portland] and have a look at the snowboarders, I challenge you to find a [Nike] swoosh," Riley said. Snowboarders avoided Nike "like it was the bubonic plague." Riley said that the company had tried to do a market study with snowboarders around Boulder, Colorado, but couldn't even recruit people for the research. Riley explained, "You go to Boulder and you're wearing the swoosh, and it's like, 'What the hell are you doing here? You've obviously come from New York. You're not one of us. You're about the urban experience. You're about basketball. You're about a giant corporation. We don't want you here.'"

When Riley thinks about markets now, he envisions local communities of special interests. What happens within these homogeneous clusters
is
the market. So instead of spending money on demographic research, Riley tries to tap into these lifestyle communities. When I met Riley in the fall of 2005, he was working at Apple. He said that he planned to take his Apple marketing staff to Marfa, Texas, because the little town on the edge of the Big Bend section of the Rio Grande appeared to be an emerging center of cultural influence. The minimalist sculptor Donald Judd had moved to the West Texas town decades ago, and Marfa had since become a most unlikely boomtown of art galleries, espresso cafés, Prada shops, French restaurants, and cool hotels. People were aggregating around communities of interest, Riley said, and those communities had an address. Riley said that he could learn more about hip culture by spending a weekend in Marfa than by buying reams of Zip Code research.

Place matters, and so does proximity. An MIT researcher tracked the communication patterns among employees in seven research and development firms. The closer people were to one another, the more they talked.
³⁰
William Whyte showed with his study of air conditioners in Philadelphia that we buy what those close to us buy. The purveyors of "buzz" marketing schemes count on the word about their products traveling through networks that are created, in part, by physical proximity.

In the early 1960s, F. B. Evans studied the links between the sellers and the buyers of life insurance. Evans proposed that the "more similar the parties" in the relationship, the more likely the salesman would be to make a deal. In a study of 125 salesmen and 500 prospects, he found that sales were more likely between people of the same height and similar education, but that sales dropped if the salesman earned less than the prospect. Sales were
highest
when the salesman belonged to the same political party as the client. Sales were
lowest
when the salesman and prospect had different political allegiances.
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The Hartford Institute's David Roozen searched for the secret of church growth in a survey of more than 11,000 Protestant congregations in 2000. He found that churches with a defined "niche" grew faster than those with broader, more general missions. (Segmenting worked with religion as well as with Tide detergent.) Churches with a variety of programs (mass customization) grew faster, too. But the most important feature of growing churches, Roozen found, was an absence of conflict.
³²
Marketers, ministers, and, soon, politicians learned that people wanted both conformity in interests and agreement in opinions. They wanted the society they lived in to be just like the cars they bought—customized.

In 2003, historian Lizabeth Cohen wrote that at one time, politicians tried to "convince voters of some common good, as Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower all struggled to do." But a new political strategy that applied techniques of market segmentation to politics led the nation away from these ideals, requiring candidates to "at best construct a composite vision out of the specialized interests of their distinct constituencies, and at worst avoid discussing any common good at all." Old-style campaigns with parades, uniforms, and choirs in horse-drawn wagons may have aimed at the lowest common social denominator, but, as Cohen noted, at least they enhanced the democratic notion of commonweal.
³³

When politicians began to apply one-to-one marketing methods to elections, they abandoned the possibility of a common good. Breaking the country into tiny market segments resulted in the death of consensus—and the possibility that Americans could agree at times to split the difference. "I've been struck in this election," marketer J. Walker Smith told me in the summer of 2004, "in the way that ... this one-to-one business philosophy characterizes what the Democratic and Republican parties are doing." The presidential campaign that year was both loud and omnipresent, but there was little evidence of persuasion. There were no attempts to turn Republicans into Democrats, or Democrats into Republicans. Early on, it seemed, both parties determined that what they cared most about was loyalty. The campaigns cultivated the cocksureness that arises within all like-minded groups. This was going to be an election based on turnout, and confident people vote in higher percentages than do those who feel conflicted. Besides, in this world, who likes, wants, or needs conflict—especially conflicting ideas?

"We're going to market to our own party," Smith said, explaining the strategy. "We're not going to worry about a message that would be broadly inclusive. We're only going to tell Republicans or only tell Democrats what they want to hear. We aren't going to talk to them about things they might not want to hear. And we are going to try to ensure that they feel so loyal that they'll get out and vote. What we're trying to do is drive customer loyalty—and, in marketing terms, drive the average transaction size or improve the likelihood that a registered Republican will get out and vote Republican. That's a business philosophy applied to politics that I think is really dangerous, because it's not about trying to form a consensus, to get people to think about the greater good. That is a business philosophy applied to politics that is all about polarization."

Specialization is for insects.

—
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN,
Time Enough for Love

 

P
AUL
G
UINAN EXPLAINED
the unlikely happenstance that brought Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, Conan the Barbarian, Catwoman, and the Fantastic Four together in a one-room office on the third floor of a building on SW Fifth Street in downtown Portland, Oregon. "It's like an immigrant finds out a place is okay and then brings his family," Guinan said as he worked away in the middle of Mercury Studio, the office that houses thirteen of the nation's best comic book artists. (At one time or another, these artists have drawn or inked nearly every superhero.) "We're like that. We're like the Irish." Well, not
exactly
like the Irish. The comic book artists and writers who moved to Portland over the past twenty years weren't fleeing potato blight. They weren't southern field hands or Appalachian coal miners gone to Detroit, Chicago, or Cleveland after being displaced by automated cotton pickers or continuous mining machines. Rather, they came to Portland because this was where they wanted to be, where they could live among their own kind.

The English economist Alfred Marshall examined the agglomeration of industries in nineteenth-century England—textile manufacturers in Manchester and cutlery makers in Sheffield—and observed the economic advantages when industry clustered. Textile manufacturers in Manchester shared knowledge about the latest weaving techniques and markets. Skilled spinners were ready for hire because the business of mills and textiles was part of Manchester. "Great are the advantages which people following the same skilled trade get from near neighborhood to one another," Marshall wrote. "The mysteries of the trade become no mysteries, but are, as it were, in the air, and children learn many of them unconsciously."
¹
Jeff Parker channeled Marshall when he explained why he had moved to Portland and Mercury Studio from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. "It's the whole idea of why you send your kid to Harvard," Parker told me as he rewrote the story line for a Fantastic Four book. "You see people around here doing it, and it just seems normal. It becomes more normal for you. Seeing the possibilities is important."

The comics business has flourished in Portland partly because of Mike Richardson. Richardson opened a chain of comic book stores in the early 1980s, first in Bend, Oregon, and then in Portland. His stores did well, and before long he wasn't just selling comic books; he was publishing them.
²
Richardson hired comic book writers, editors, and artists—so many of them that his Dark Horse Comics became the third-largest comic book publisher in the country, home of
Star Wars, Alien, Predator, Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
and
The Terminator
³
The first comic book migrants who found their way to Portland worked for Dark Horse. Others followed.

The same economic forces that Marshall had described in Manchester's cluster of textile mills were at work in the Portland comic book scene—and, in particular, in the warren of artists at Mercury Studio. Mercury serves as a loosely formed business partnership. When an artist at Mercury is up against an impossible deadline, others in the group pitch in, drawing backgrounds or inking. They share ideas and leads on jobs. For publishers, the cluster of Portland artists makes it easier to find workers. (New York executives from big comic book houses such as DC Comics and Marvel make trips to Portland.) The artists at Mercury save money by sharing space, and they keep up a steady rap about industry gossip, current events, and comic book lore as they sketch and ink. When I was there, Drew Johnson claimed that when he drew Wonder Woman, he was "the first guy who actually shrank her boobs." The "mysteries of the trade" were certainly in the air.

An economic magnetism was pulling those interested in the comics business to Portland, but something else was at work, too. The city's way of life was uniquely hospitable to artists, writers, and book publishers. Portland was (and is) a city of books and readers. In the 1990s, it was one of 17 cities, out of 211 media markets, that had both a low rate of television watching and a high rate of reading. The city ranked 5th in the absolute number of used bookstores (after New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Seattle). It ranked nth in the sale of science fiction. Portland was a good home for comics because the people who lived there read books and bought books.
⁴

Portland also was where these comic book artists and writers wanted to be.

Comic book people moved to Portland with no particular plan. "They didn't have a job lined up, they didn't have a place to stay, but they had somebody to crash with for a while, and they figured it would work out," explained comic book editor and writer Anina Bennett. The Portland comic book community is filled with those who got there through a lack of planning. Randy Jarrell, one of the founders of the independent Oni Press, was married and hanging around Austin when, "literally, on a Sunday we said, 'Lets move to Portland; I have some friends there.' On Wednesday, we hit the road."

Portland economist Joe Cortright explained that the Portland economy is built on "books, beer, bikes, and Birkenstocks." Sockless footwear is code for liberal politics (Portland's Multnomah County voted seven to three for Kerry in 2004), which means that artists come to Portland for a cultural constellation that includes comics, microbrews, lifestyle, and a Democratic majority. "The reason I moved here wasn't because of comics," said Randy Jarrell. "The reason I moved here is probably the reason everyone else moved here. A lot of it had to do with politics, you know. Portland [has] all the amenities your typical liberal-type person would want. You have a great library system, one of the best in the country. You have great parks. You get public transportation, affordable universities. A lot of that had to do with it."

The three guys who run Oni Press all were raised in the Republican suburbs of the Southwest. They moved to a Democratic city where they didn't always have to drive a car. Jeff Parker, the Fantastic Four writer, said he moved to Portland because it was a "place I could ride my bike. It's like a little Amsterdam." As David Hahn puttered away on a Bite Club book (with a vampire mafia motif) for DC Comics, he explained that he used Portland's many bookstores—particularly the mammoth Powell's Books—as a giant reference library. Steve Lieber (Batman and Swamp Thing) said that his wife is a librarian, whose "life revolves around books." They moved to Portland so that she could work in "the best library system in the country."

In 1956, economist Charles Tiebout theorized that people would pick and choose among communities to find a desirable array of local services at an acceptable level of taxes. People would look for the best deal and then move. There would be millions of "elections," as people cast their votes for communities with moving vans and apartment leases. According to Tiebout, the sorting would mostly be based on economics, as people sought their own balance between services provided and taxes charged. But he also imagined people making their decisions about where to live based on who would be their neighbors. In a footnote to his classic article "A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures," the economist allowed, "Not only is the consumer-voter concerned with economic patterns, but he desires, for example, to associate with 'nice' people." Whether for low taxes or the right kind of neighbors, people would cast their ballots for a community. They would vote with their feet.
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