Last month Seth Godin linked to a seven question quiz based on data from the General Social Survey.
Apparently, the most your responses can align with those of others in the United States is 7%.
Godin scored 4%. My score was around 1%.
So when you believe that millions of people think like you do, you are technically correct in that at most ~24 million people out of 342.6 million in the US hold the exact same set of beliefs as you.
But also there are even more millions who don’t.
I have been writing a bit about marketing to different audiences the past few weeks. In the context of this data it makes me wonder how valid the exercise of creating hypothetical profiles of audiences actually is.
If at most 7% of the community you are trying to reach is going to perfectly share the beliefs of others in the community, you are really angling for a small segment of the community.
The percentage is guaranteed to be smaller than 7% because at least a few percent will be knocked off when people who don’t like or feel comfortable with whatever you are offering self-select out.
Obviously the remaining 2%-4% (which may still be an overestimate) don’t have to be perfectly in-synch with one another to enjoy experiences your organization offers.
Ultimately, participation in arts and culture may indeed have niche appeal because that is the best you can hope for.
Though again, 2% of the US population is about 7 million people which isn’t a small number, except in relation to the whole nation.
One can pick almost any set of independent questions that have about 50% yes answers, and 7 such questions will get your “all agree” number to about 1%. It is not a deep (or particularly interesting) result.
What you want to look for are non-independent questions—ones where the answer to one question strongly predicts the answer to another. In particular, you are looking for things that correlate well with “this person would come to our performance/exhibit, if they knew the right things about it”.