Economic Cohorts

Economics are at the heart of every household purchase decision. Income, credit capacity, spending power and other financial measures play a significant role in consumer behavior. Economic Cohorts is a household-level marketing segmentation system that helps marketers better understand and communicate more relevant consumer offers by providing additional insights into likely economic capacity, behaviors and demographics of target households. It enables marketers to answer questions such as:

How can I determine the product preference and household economics that drive the spending decisions of my prospects and customers?
How can I best combine my customer data with household economics data to improve my marketing ROI?

Economic Cohorts is the first segmentation system to provide marketers a complete picture of the customer wallet in combination with all of the key demographic, behavioral and lifestyle attributes you expect from a first-class consumer segmentation system. It classifies all U.S. households into one of 71 different household types called “clusters” or “segments” based on a multi-dimensional framework including:

Economic capacity — estimated income, spending, credit capacity and usage, and ability to pay
Behaviors and characteristics — lifestyles, media, channels, age, demographics, psychographics, home ownership, and urbanicity

Economic Cohorts is built on a foundation of proprietary economic data derived from multiple sources, including the Equifax proprietary database of consumer investable assets, whereas other segmentation solutions rely on survey and/or Census-based data as the primary driver of their clustering methodology. Equifax Economic Insights data also more accurately identifies affluent households.

Economic Cohorts can be bundled with our other financial capacity measures such as Ability to Pay Index™, Income360, Affluence Index™, Spending Power™, CreditStyles Pro, and Financial Durability Index to provide an even more granular view of household financial health and resilience.

Fields Included:
Cluster name, code and description
ZIP, ZIP4, DPC

The Economic Cohorts user guide provides profiles for all 71 clusters. Each profile includes: cluster name and code; cluster description; percent of U.S. households; indicators for lifestage, income, spending and credit; demographic summary and details; economic summary (median income, median discretionary spending, % spending/income, credit utilization, ability to pay, home ownership); geographic summary; leisure and interests (hobbies and activities); media (preferences, tv, internet); attitudes (financial, auto, buying, health, interests, tech, travel, ads); lifestyle (auto, entertainment, buying, travel). The user guide will be provided upon product subscription.