Class and Color Blindness in Mexican Consumer Segmentation

• In Event: Consumption, city and citizenship in compared contexts, new approaches to consumption in everyday life.

Abstract

As one of Latin America’s main hubs for the marketing industry, Mexico City is home to small marketing agencies and regional satellite offices of global holdings. Taken together, marketing industry activities play a key role in reproducing dominant ideologies, constructing urban identities, and configuring urban spaces in Mexico. This paper focuses on how the professional discourse of the Mexican marketing industry conceptualizes the urban consumer public through a practice known as consumer segmentation. Consumer segmentation is a core principle of marketing. In this practice, marketers divide up the mass consumer public into sub-groups according to specific shared behaviors, interests or characteristics, which are then used to identify the target consumer group for a particular product or service. The Mexican marketing industry’s official method of consumer segmentation is known as Los Niveles Socioeconomicos, wherein Mexican consumers are organized by marketers according to socioeconomic levels based on a variety of metrics such as financial security, education level, disposable income, sanitary conditions, number of light fixtures, and the physical amount of space in the home. This framework is used by marketers as a basis for designing and advertising products. In the process, Los Niveles Socioeconomicos also reproduce stringent socioeconomic segregation of consumption spaces and practices in Mexico City. In particular, I argue that the theoretical and practical applications of Los Niveles Socioeconomicos reveal the highly class conscious yet rhetorically color blind character of Mexican consumer society, whereby vast income inequality is discussed without ever mentioning its intersection with race, racism or colorism. Drawing upon ethnographic work with marketers in Mexico City, this paper focuses on how marketing industry paradigms and practices such as consumer segmentation reproduce class consciousness and color blindness through the segregation and stratification of urban marketing and consumption spaces.

Author

• Marcel Salas