I got near 200k miles from mine and it a very fun car to drive. I don’t regret that one at all.
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“It exists because we ignore it; it will end because we purchase it.”
Reaper jokes aside, does this count as evidence that “luck” is indeed a character stat rather than a pure statistical phenomenon?
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Nevertheless, I can see the marketing industry picking this up like some piece of cargo-cult wisdom and getting into a desperate race to ensure that the people in these zip codes don’t use their products, to the point of pushing their competitors’ brands instead. You could get a short story or an episode of Black Mirror out of that if you took it to its logical illogical conclusion.
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I dunno, I’m gonna need to see the studies on this before I put this in the definite no pile.
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…and to top it all off, each one is also a Neilson household. Which would explain the last 60 years of televison history pretty well…
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Dammit!
I don’t even want to admit how much of this I bought during the very short time it was around…
I may just be able to tell you at least one of those zip codes…
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It’s me, isn’t it? I drank the Crystal Pepsi. I watched Strange Luck, The Dresden Files, and Happy. They don’t sell the pasta I like, anymore. I’d kill for a sequel to Eternal Darkness. It’s definitely me. Well, thanks for breaking it to me gently. Wait, does this mean If I’d voted for Trump he’d have lost?
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Predict, forecast, prophesy, foretell, prognosticate, forebode, bode, augur, spell, foretoken, presage, portend, foreshow, foreshadow, forerun, herald, point to, betoken, indicate!
This. absolutely.
It would be interesting to know some of those zip codes.
I’m not sure that “marketing research” is socially useful. But people whose livelihoods depend on selling shit that people don’t need, yet still buy, can make more money if they understand the research.
The first paper in this research thread
https://doi.org/10.1509/jmr.13.0415 argues that certain customers habitually buy products that fail in the larger scheme of things. Therefore, sales to those individuals are no guarantee future success, and it’s useful to identify those sorts of customers before committing future resources to a mass marketing campaign. (The product may still have some niche appeal, but the marketing strategy will need to be different,)
This paper (https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0022243719867935) argues that instead of investing resources in identifying individual customers, a filter by zip code tends to work just as well --more so than the control variables (age, income, home value, house type, distance to competitors, housing density, ethnicity, coupon use and price paid)
I can’t say for certain, but it sounds as if 25 percent of zipcodes fall into this category.
I don’t know, I think they have value as long as you don’t think they have much in the way of predictive power. They only discover correlations, and may propose reasons why they exist, the reasons are just guess work and have very little value, but “this interesting state exists” does have value.
The value is largely limited to “ok we should now try to do some science to see why this state exists!”.
That is useful in and of itself though, if we didn’t know “harbinger households” existed we would be far less likely to attempt to figure out why they exist, how good they are at predicting anything, and if they can be converted to non-harbinger households (or if non-harbinger households can be converted to harbinger households). Or from a marketing perspective how to discover them and trim them out of various datasets and test markets 
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In Kentucky, the county lines are drawn the way they are because of an ancient law that every point inside the county had to be no more than 1 day’s horse ride from the county seat. In an area with a lot of hills that prevent you from traveling in a straight line, that results in some pretty odd shapes on the map.
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Now see, THAT is a legitimate reason for weird boundary lines.
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They say the same thing about GA… perhaps it’s a bit of a myth?
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