And so are you. During the last 2 weeks or so, I had no internet access, due to Telstra stuffing up – they thought I was moving houses (I moved 6 months ago), and got an old move order mixed up. In those times, I had nothing to do except watch my old movies and TV series. So, I rewatched Battlestar Galactica and Full Metal Panic.

What these shows have in common?  Robots, and sexy scenes. I fall into the demographic that watches stuff with fighting robots and sexy scenes – male, mid-20s, into tech gadgets and stuff. I’m the kind of guy who listens to ABC Classic FM (who on Tuesday broke into my iPod and played exactly all the songs on my playlist). Marketers know this.

Also, a few days ago, I passed off an off-hand comment about how a potential customer that my company was selling to is of a low social-economic status (SES) based on just the name of the customer (lower SES = less education = more misspelled names). The company I’m working for of course, sells only to a group that it deems to be able to afford a purchase.

And my colleague says that my comment was harsh and unjustified – we cannot simply judge people by their SES (of course, the irony is my company puts its potential customers through a rigorous 3-stage test to see if they can afford the products). She proceeded to give an example of  how a weirdly named customer had actually bought and paid for the product. And, she concluded, that I should not skip the doing the test with the potential customer (which I had no intention of anyways, it was just an offhand comment)

In my opinion though, there is nothing wrong with judging someone or something, as long as you do not let your judgement obscure your actions. We all can’t help but to pre-judge things. Marketers do that all the time. They size you up and see which demographic you fall into. And then they sell you things based on what demographic you fall into. SES is just another demographic – and one that can be changed too.

Of course, at the end of the day it is ultimately our actions that determine things.  A marketer may put you in demographic A and try to sell you things for demographic A. But you might like things from demographic B too. The only reason why product A was pushed to you was because the marekter would spend a lot of time trying to push to you products A to Z. Demographics clustering and pre-judgements are just heuristics – shortcuts for the brain.

And of course, our brains need the shortcuts. Without these heuristical shortcuts, we’d be incapacitated going through all information in the world. You wouldn’t even be able to get out of bed.

Why is it pre-judging a person and not taking any actions based on the judgments worse than actual discriminatory actions (i.e. to take actions based on discrimination and differentiation)? The human mind is weird.

Anyways, at the end, I still did the test with the potential customer who had a misspelled common name. And lo and behold, she did turn out to be of a low SES household. But she also did test to be a potential customer who can afford the product we’re selling. If I had prejudged and taken discriminatory actions, then the customer would have been lost to the company. I had merely prejudged… and in my opinion there is nothing wrong with that.

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