So What, Who Cares (vol 1, issue 53) Why we will never be warm again

Hello and welcome to the downward slide of the week that is. Two small notes about this newsletter: First, do not expect an edition for Thanksgiving night/Black Friday morning.

Second, if you have suggestions, comments or concerns, please do not hesitate to reach out via email or Twitter. I do read your emails and I apologize if I owe you a response. (This goes double for the folks who were kind enough to write in about their most loathed children's lit classics.)

*

Some scientists think polar vortices are here to stay in the North American winter wonderland. Jennifer Francis, a researcher with the Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences at Rutgers University, predicts that as the Arctic warms, the jet stream that circles counter-clockwise between the Arctic and North America will weaken and narrow. A typhoon can shake a weakened jet stream much more easily, and that will send surges of freezing air down to the U.S. There are a few researchers who are uneasily muttering, "She is probably on to something ..."

So what? Weather is big business: It affects everything from when and what kind of food we can grow to how to move goods across the country. Weather can challenge government infrastructure. (We're seeing this already with water shortages in the west.) Longer, colder winters in the U.S. could severely disrupt several sectors in the U.S. economy -- transportation, restaurants, retail, logistics, agriculture -- because current business models and infrastructure were not developed with sustained arctic chill in mind. Then there's the human cost.

Who cares? Are you a mutant who is undeterred by the vagaries of the weather? Are you a mutant who causes vagaries in the weather? (If so, email me, Ororo Munroe!) If you answered "no" to either of these, then you should probably care because earlier and more severe winters will highlight the weaknesses in your local infrastructure, make it tougher to make the holiday pilgrimages, kill crops, kill livestock (thus driving up meat prices), and open the door to another year of Elsa-from-Frozen jokes.

*
Good news, ladies! We have six distinct stages of life, and none of them are "babe," "district attorney" or "Driving Miss Daisy."

The research firm Harbinger Communications breaks down the arc of a woman's life into the following stages: SINGLETON ("beyond health, she is most interested in beauty, fashion, travel, sports, technology and pop culture"); ME TO WE ("home and family become greater interests; other interests decline vs. the Singleton"); PRESCHOOL MOM ("interest in travel and current events ... hits a low"); SCHOOL MOM ("beauty and fashion become less of a priority"); ZOOMER ("priorities shift significantly from her children and career to leisure and wellness"); GOLDEN YEARS ("interest in health and current events peaks, while her interest in beauty, fashion and pop culture falls"). There's more: Harbinger has further split the six categories into ten sub-categories, using metrics like differences in income and when the woman was likely to have her kids.

So what? The point to this exercise -- as with all segmentation -- is to identify a group's weak spots, i.e. what appeals to them when marketing products. For example:

SINGLE MOM has high hopes for herself and for her children • will respond to accessible, social, aspirational brands that empower her to pursue her dreams on a shoestring

Fun fact: If you type the word "mom" repeatedly, it begins to lose all meaning and becomes a textual mantra. Moooooooooooom.

Who cares? Data mining and market research are a potent one-two force for pushing products at people precisely when they're the most vulnerable to purchasing them. The thing is, few of us have any transparency into who has our data, who's profiting when they sell our data to others, or what categories marketers are putting us in -- or what buttons they're mashing when they want us to buy.

Extra reading: If you want to see another example of market segmentation in action, go to the Claritas website and enter your zip code to see how Nielsen classifies you and your neighbors. I also recommend picking up a used copy of The Clustered World by Michael J. Weiss (read the first chapter here), which posits that the U.S. is a loose coalition of 62 separate lifestyle tribes, each with their own rituals and values. It's worth a read to get a general idea of how marketers used to -- or perhaps still do -- see the nation today.

*
Your pop culture note of the day ... will return. This has not been a week for pop culture consumption, and nobody is sadder about it than I am.

*
Did you miss an issue of So What, Who Cares? The archive is here. Also, there is now a topic index that tells you what was in each issue. If you're like, "When did she send out a picture of Brandon Routh snuggling a kitty cat?" -- well, now you can find it. (It was November 11, 2014, btw.)

As always, I welcome your feedback and suggestions via email or Twitter. Always let me know what you think about So What, Who Cares? If you really like it, tell a friend to subscribe.