ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the history of geodemographics. It introduces the 'Output Area Classification' (OAC) derived from the UK census, a system built by academics rather than commercial organisations and thus more open to scrutiny. The chapter describes an overview of the process of data selection, the classification methods employed and the practical application of the OAC, in order to give the reader a good understanding of the fundamentals of geodemographic analysis. The commercial significance of the technique gave rise to many applications in target marketing and retail planning, and this allowed investment in the progressive updating and refinement of the systems. Certainly one set of products that have aided location planning teams working in international markets has been the increased availability of global geodemographic products. Geodemographic classifications have been used over an extended period of time to provide a straightforward representation of variations in the composition of neighbourhoods in a way that is readily understood and easy to interpret.
