Alan Knight, Membership Marketing Manager at New York Farm Bureau has become very intrigued with demographics, and has been reading about a commonly pushed marketing industry theory that pretty much everyone who shares a zip-plus-4 zip-code has the same outlook, same leanings, same education, same buying habits, etc. “As I mentally drive the back roads of rural New York and talk to our NYFB field staff people, I don’t see much evidence of that being true, especially since farmers are a small minority in almost every town, often surrounded by long-distance commuters, idealist professors, mobile-home dwellers living on the edge, and Amish,” said Alan. “That doesn’t strike me as zip-code homogeneity.”
He reported that he had just finished reading a most thought-provoking book titled The Big Sort by Bill Bishop. Its underlying premise is that since the 1970s, tens of millions of Americans have pulled up stakes and relocated, mostly for jobs. And when they do, they select neighborhoods in which to live where everyone is pretty much like them… “The book’s findings have enormous implications for the marketing of Farm Bureau memberships, the ability to harmoniously form AFBF policy, and the likelihood that these new, like-minded, philosophically rigid American tribes can find a way to co-exist, at all,” said Alan. “The book has a lot to say about who we are in rural America, and the outlook for our future. I recommend it to your readers—indeed, to all Farm Bureau leaders.”
