Fortune 400 LifeStyles

All The Money In the World is a new book about the Fortune 400 over time. It has a lot of interesting information about this group of wealthy people. If read properly, it illustrates that the wealthy have a range of LifeStyles and must be segmented from a marketing perspective.

The first 200 pages are devoted to summarizing how the Forbes 400 have made their fortunes (no pun intented). Most are self-made and come from rather ordinary beginnings (p. 116). Their enterprises (pps. 112-113) range from hauling trash (Huizenga) to hedge funds (Cohen), from fashion (Lauren) to fantasy (Spielberg). The greatest increase among the 400 has been among those that are in finance and technology.

The 400 come from different sections of the country (Chapter 6) and those on the West Coast are described as having a more laid-back style although it is hard to generalize:Grove? Ellison? Jobs?

They drive different cars (p. 226) and live in very different housing (Chapter 9).

We can piece some of this information together. We learn on different pages of the book the size of Bill Gates's house, which cars he personally drives, his charitable inclinations, his education and, of course, how he became wealthy. We can add information from other sources to know how he dresses, his personal grooming and his reading interests. We add it all together and know that his LifeStyle is very different from Donald Trump's.

If we do this exercise for the entire list we will identify a spectrum of LifeStyles with Donald Trump on one end and someone like Ross Perot, Sr. on the other end. (While The Donald is being chauffered in his new limo Ross is driving himself in his vintage Ford Crown Victoria.)

There is no doubt you or I would market differently to two people with such different LifeStyles. From the information scattered about the book, its evident that the 400, like the rest of the affluent population, are distributed along a range of LifeStyles in between these bookends.

In the next entry we will try to assemble a few mosiacs of the other LifeStyles and discuss how to market to each of them.