Lattitudes and Attitudes
Lattitudes and Attitudes: An Atlas of American Tastes, Trends, Politics, and Passions
By Michael J. Weiss.
Published by Little, Brown and Co., 1994. Copyright held by the author.
This is a paperback book measuring 7.5" by 10" and running to 224 pages.
What it is is a kind of a cultural atlas of the U.S. In the first section it shows geographic breakdowns of a whole host of interesting statistics on the popularity of different products and ideas, like bagels, types of beer, books vs. television, shopping malls, fraternal orders, recliners, power tools, Tupperware, pets, condoms, cologne, cigarettes, jogging, hunting, Volvos, SUV's, specific TV shows, different types of music, specific magazines, as well as positions on social issues. Each page in this section presents a map and a few paragraphs about a certain statistic, or a pair of statistics juxtaposed. The maps represent survey results in four colors, which is enough to tell you something. The results are sometimes surprising, often showing cultural breakdowns quite different from the red-state/blue-state cliche. In very many maps, however, the country's largest metropolitan areas are culturally linked (for instance, people in these places bake from scratch comparatively little - big surprise, and also are below average in buying lay-z-boy recliners, and are politically the most liberal).
The second section has entries on specific geographical markets ("places" seen from a marketing standpoint). Each entry in this section gives a run-down on what products and ideologies are "hot" and "not hot" in that geographic area, also providing a paragraph-long summary of the place from a marketing standpoint, as well as some minimal, key demographic information.
It's interesting to see consumer patterns broken down geographically and mixed with political attitudes like this. It's a fun book, but not terribly serious. It's generally not possible to draw conclusions from the maps without bringing in prior knowledge of cultural geography.
For each map the original source of the statistic is cited. It's usually a private market research firm.
This is a fun book, potentially most useful in a practical sense to marketing students and to people looking to market their product or service (or idea) in the right parts of the country.
It is a bit dated.
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