A new way of segmenting customers.

• Position: New Products - Personicx from Acxiom Corp. - Brief Article

Americans are individuals, as the micro-marketing gurus have been telling us for some years now. On the other hand--and let's face this head-on--they aren't as individual as all that. We all have common touch points that permit us to make contact with, and identify with, each other. When it comes to marketing, the trick is to find those touch points.

There are, of course, all sorts of ways to divide the population into categories for marketing purposes: demographically and psychographically being two of the most popular methods. Now Acxiom Corp., Downers Grove, ILL, an international information management firm, proposes another method, Personicx, which it calls the "next evolution" in customer segmentation.

The approach is to divide households into "life stage segments"--70 of them in all, corresponding not only to socioeconomic and demographic criteria but also to the experiences that member-households have undergone in the past. This "multi-dimensional" process, says Acxiom, permits marketers to target audiences more precisely than with other approaches.

"By marrying academic findings and analytical acumen with the wealth of data available in Acxiom's InfoBase, Personicx is a segmentation system at least one order higher in terms...