If The Name Fits... ''New eco-topia''...''Old money flats''...''Kids & cul-de-sacs''...if these areas don't sound familiar, listen to what Michael J. Weiss has to say: Your customers live there.

Marketing meeting: Take One. "We sell electronic organizersso we should market to anyone who needs organization or likesgadgets. Let's send a flyer to everyone in town."marketing meeting: Take Two. "We've cluster analyzed ZIPcodes in a five-mile radius of our store. Area one and four aremostly seniors and blue-collar families, so we'll focus onareas two, three and five professional singles and white-collarmiddle class and affluent families who buy personal electronics.We'll target 30 blocks with three separate mailers."isn't it nice to know the person you're marketing to mayactually want your product or service?

Geodemographics, also known as cluster or lifestyle marketing,jolts demographic marketing up a few notches. "Geodemographicsis kind of a holistic approach to marketing," says Michael J.Weiss, author of The Clustered World: How We Live, What We Buy,and What it all Means About Who We Are (Little, Brown andCompany). "It doesn't just consider demographicinformation like age, income and marital status. It also looks atthe effect of whether people live in a city, a small town or arural area. It looks at lifestage whether you're young andsingle, a couple with kids, or a retiree. And it also looks atother factors, specifically how you behave in themarketplace."

Weiss, a freelance writer by trade, initiated his study ofgeodemographics after interviewing Jonathan Robbin, founder ofClaritas Inc. Robbin, a social scientist, merged census data,marketing surveys and ZIP codes into a lifestyle segmentationsystem called PRIZM (potential rating index for ZIP markets), thebasis for cluster marketing in the United States. Intrigued by thegeodemographics concept, Weiss took on the marketing-sciencebeat.