Cultural Creatives: Lifestyle Preferences of Cultural Creatives

For more than 13 years, sociologist Paul Ray has been studying American values. Based on surveys of more than 100,000 Americans, plus many focus groups and in-depth interviews, he identified three major value streams.

Moderns are the dominant culture, (50 %). This group contains those who most value material progress and "what gets measured gets done." When we have problems like work overload, we look first to technical solutions, such as improved time management.

Traditionals (24%), dream of a more moral and leisurely world based on small-town or rural models.

Cultural Creatives with 26 percent is the fastest growing group and is the population that is most interested in spiritual and social concerns.

According to the book by Paul Ray and Sherry Anderson, "Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People are Changing the World", cultural creatives are:

 "The ones who care most deeply about ecology and saving the planet, about relationships, peace and social justice, about self-actualization, spirituality, and self-expression . . . they're activists, volunteers and contributors to good causes more often than other Americans.

Cultural Creatives are, typically, middle to upper-middle class people with a lot of spending power, but much of US business ignores them, so they have developed a number of ways to get what they want anyway.”

Here are some generalizations, from many highly targeted studies:

 Readers and radio listeners, not TV watchers: Cultural Creatives buy more books and magazines, listen to more radio, including classical music and NPR, and watch less television, than any other groups. They are both literate and discriminating, and dislike most of what is on TV.

  Arts and culture: Cultural Creatives are prodigious consumers and producers of culture. They are more likely to be involved in the arts, are more likely to write books and articles, and to go to meetings and workshops about books they have read.

  Stories, whole process, and systems: Cultural Creatives appreciate good stories, and demand systems views of the "whole process" of whatever they are reading, from cereal boxes to product descriptions to magazine articles. They want to know where a product came from, how it was made, who made it, and what will happen to it when they are done with it. They also want symbols that go deep, and actively resent advertising and children's TV more than most Americans.

  Careful consumers: Cultural Creatives are the kind of people who buy and use Consumer Reports on most consumer durables goods: appliances, cars, consumer electronics. For the most part, they are the careful, well-informed shoppers who do not buy on impulse, and read up on a purchase first. They are practically the only consumers who regularly read the labels as they're supposed to.

  A different kind of car, please: Cultural Creatives are far more likely to want safety and fuel economy in a mid-price car. If they could also get an ecologically sound, high mileage, recyclable car, they'd snap it up.

  Technology moderates: Cultural Creatives are less likely to be innovators, and more likely to be early adopters, of technological products.

  Soft innovation: However, Cultural Creatives do tend to be innovators and opinion leaders for some knowledge-intensive products, including magazines, fine foods, wines, and boutique beers.The foodies: A high proportion of Cultural Creatives are "foodies": people who like to talk about food (before and after), experiment with new kinds of food, cook food with friends, eat out a lot, do gourmet and ethnic cooking, try natural foods and health foods, etc.

  Desire for authenticity: Cultural Creatives invented the term "authenticity" as consumers understand it, leading the rebellion against things that are "plastic", fake, imitation, poorly made, throwaway, cliche style, and high fashion. If they buy something in a traditional style they want it authentically traditional, with a story. This also includes a desire for authenticity and human contact in the service sector.

  A different kind of new house, please: Cultural Creatives tend to buy fewer new houses than most people of their income level, finding that they are not designed with them in mind. So they buy resale houses and fix them up the way they want. They abhor the status display home that shows a lot to the street, strongly preferring to be hidden from the street by fences, trees and shrubbery. All that militates against buying the kinds of new homes that builders are prone to put out there for the upper-middle class. They also like authentic styling in homes-whatever fits into its proper place on the land is good. They want access to nature, walking and biking paths, ecological preservation, historic preservation, and to live in master planned communities that show a way to re-create community.

  Personalization of the home: Interior decoration for Cultural Creatives is typically eclectic, with a lot of original art on the walls and crafts pieces around the house. Many Core Cultural Creatives seem to think a house is not properly furnished without a lot of books. The same house that vanishes from the street should be personalized so that status displays happen inside the house, not outside, though it is not blatant: It is display of personal good taste and a creative sense of style.

  Experiential consumers: Core Cultural Creatives are the prototypical consumers of the experience industry, which tries to sell you a more intense/enlightening/enlivening experience rather than a thing: psychotherapy, weekend workshops, spiritual gatherings, personal growth experiences, vacations-as-self-discovery, vacations-at-health-spas, etc. The providers of these services have to be Cultural Creatives too, or they can't do it authentically (the kiss of death), and so one sometimes gets the impression that everyone is taking in everyone else's wash-or workshop.

  The leading edge of vacation travel: Cultural Creatives define the leading edge of vacation travel that is exotic, adventuresome-without-(too much)-danger, educational, experiential, authentic, altruistic and/or spiritual. They don't do package tours, fancy resorts, or cruises, and resent having to take the kids to Disneyland.

  Holistic everything: Cultural Creatives are the prototypical innovators in, and consumers of, personal growth psychotherapy, alternative health care and natural foods. What ties these together is a belief in holistic health: body-mind-spirit are to be unified. They are forever sorting out the weird from the innovative. They may include a high proportion of people whom some physicians describe as "the worried well": those who monitor every twitch and pain and bowel movement, in a minutely detailed attention to the body, which may be why they spend more on alternative health care and regular health care even though most are fairly healthy. They may live longer, because they do at least some kinds of preventive medicine-in contrast to the Modernist executive pattern of treating the body like a machine that you feed, exercise, and vitaminize, and otherwise ignore until it breaks down.