It’s always a daunting challenge: explaining an ever-fragmenting market to your clients while building your consultancy’s intellectual capital. That old stand-by of risk-shy and ad-aware behaviour, the middle class, seems to be disappearing into smaller niches characterized by individualistic behaviour and apparently irrational market behaviour.

“The old class-based definitions have become redundant. We need new, sharper tools to distinguish the nuances and subtleties of the recently enlarged middle classes,’ [Dan Halliday, the managing director of the brand communications agency TheFishCanSing,] adds.

‘We characterise ourselves almost exclusively with regard to taste, in particular taste as defined by consumer choice; more specifically still, taste as defined by brand loyalties.”(Campaign magazine, via TMC)

Halliday’s shop has put together The Class of 2006. A Guide to the New Middle Class, which attempts to break down the British middle class into market segments. The names are witty and will ring a sociological bell if you’re at all familiar with British society:

· THE DOING VERY NICELY THANKYOUS
· POSH CHAVS AND AGA LOUTS
· WHITE VAIN MAN AND NO SUGAR BABE
· NORMAL ACTUALLYS
· (JAMIE) OLIVER’S ARMY
· LOFT WINGERS

Campaign’s piece offers highlights of each segment, but the report goes into more detail with many illustrations. it also attempts to forecast where these segments may play on trends currently developing in general society. One example:

Put a blog in it: the new citizen media

Blogging, the axis-point of being very opinionated and having too much time on your hands, should be fundamentally middle-class. But not every tribe is doing it. Some, like the Normal Actuallys, are by nature suspicious of new trends, and frequently entirely ignorant of them. Others, like White Vain Man, just aren’t burdened by the
desire to read or be read by anyone outside their set.

Some tribes took to citizen media immediately, though. Both Doing Very Nicely Thankyous have erudite professional blogs like Phosita or Law Blog. The Hornby Set blog about politics and culture, and their comments sections are a litany of feuds between members of the Berliner and Independable sub-groups. Initially fans of the lively, up-to-the-second and media-rich blogs of Loft Wingers, the Hornby Set now find that the young turks’ posts make them self-conscious of their own efforts, and read only other Hornby Set blogs.

For their part the Loft Wingers read Holy Moly and make a great deal of noise about getting all their news from ohmynews.com or Indymedia – unless something important has happened, in which case they go to the BBC website like everyone else. Stephanie Oliver’s Army has a passing interest in photography, and has a stream for their local area on flickr.com (which is in reality a series of photos of garden birds, her dog or her car).

The Fair to Middlings were fascinated when their grown-up children introduced them to flickr, and now post pictures of their grandchildren online after every family get-together. The Fair to Militants, meanwhile, are coming to embrace the new media landscape with sites like The Grey Vote. Expect citizen media, and blogging in particular, to rise in proportion to middle-class disillusionment.

Wondering where you might fit into this new brand-relevant grouping? Try out the quick quiz at the back end of the report/deck (found at a specialist site)