"upper middle class women" "moms of the PTA"
holy wtf dude?
holy wtf dude?
Upper middle class women spend more on premium food products than lower middle class women.
(I'm a friend of Patrick's and have had dinner with him enough to guess that he's not food-savvy enough to know that upper-upper class women wouldn't buy "balsamic sauce" because it isn't packaged in a thimble and doesn't cost $150; he just happened to get that one by accident.)
Moms often cook for their families.
Moms of the PTA are especially engaged with their family life, and are especially likely to take seriously the process of shopping for premium food products.
This is called customer targeting. It's about as sexist as it is ageist to target advertising for American Girl Dolls to 8 year girls.
I'm not sure what's so hard to understand about this. Sometimes, by being knee-jerk and superficial in your reaction to gender issues, even in the "right" direction, one can actually come close to betraying a lack of understanding about what the real issues are.
(I say this as someone who has spent an embarrassing amount of money on vial-sized jars of balsamic.)
It doesn't have to represent the 100% of the consumers of such products. Just the majority.
And by the unwritten rules of how we talk about such things (in essays and such), they don't even have to be "moms of the PTA" literally. It's enough to be "moms of the PTA"-like, ie. ascribing to belong (and exhibit) the same kind of social characteristics (class, sophistication, etc) as "moms of the PTA".
Upper-middle class foodies. Who are probably less likely to be women than the market for non-premium balsamic.
http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/newswire/2011/in-u-s-men-are-sh...
...which suggest that men make 38% of retail grocery shopping trips. So, if you're going to envision a representative person who is looking for a grocery item, you should probably start out by envisioning a woman.
It is, unsurprisingly, difficult to find more specific information online for free. Instead, by googling "market analysis salad dressing", I find approximately six market research organizations that offer to sell me a report. Perhaps the OP has bought such a thing, but none of the rest of us are likely to bother.
Of course, what actually matters when trying to convert website visitors is not the demographics of the universe, or of US grocery buyers, or even of US buyers of balsamic vinegar, but the behavior of the people who are actually reaching the website. About whom we really know nothing.
And I don't think it's true either -- that older people are the major buyers of premium groceries. I don't see that many older people when I go into premium grocery stores -- except if by that you mean 35-50.
For calling the Politically Correct SWAT teams into innocent conversation. Can people say anything that does not annoy the PC crowds anymore?
Yes, in the real world, women drive more food purchases such as this than men. And mostly "upper middle class" women, or, to be more precise, upper middle class wannabes, buy something like balsamic.