Latitudes & Attitudes: An Atlas of American Tastes, Trends, Politics, and Passions: From Abilene, Texas to Zanesville, Ohio [Paperback]

Michael J. Weiss (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1994

An atlas of American consumer lifestyles features ninety color maps revealing the relative popularity of products, services, and issues across the continent, surveying everything from cocktail nuts to Oprah and analyzing the link between geography and economics. 20,000 first printing.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Where bagels are king, Twinkies don't flourish. And Alaskans buy fewer home pregnancy tests, but they're better-than-average book purchasers. What's it mean? With this remarkable atlas of marketing surveys, you can make a case for almost anything. If you can eat it, read it, visit it, watch it, play with it or listen to it, chances are it has been a survey subject, and this reference work has some fun with it. The first section is an array of clever and sometimes outlandish comparisons. The second half offers what's-hot, what's-not profiles of the nation's 209 consumer markets.

From Library Journal

The author of The Clustering of America (LJ 3/15/89) has based his new book upon consumer maps, market profiles, and demographic statistics produced in 1993 by Claritas, Inc. from survey data collected by four nationally known market research organizations and the Bureau of the Census. In the first of three parts, each page offers a nationwide consumer map with accompanying remarks on how Americans in various geographical areas feel about a particular food, drink, sport/leisure activity, household product, car, television show, music type, periodical, or political issue. The second part presents capsule profiles, with maps, of 209 local markets based upon Arbitron's Areas of Dominant Influence (from Abilene-Sweetwater, Texas, to Zanesville, Ohio), plus Alaska and Hawaii, showing "what's hot" and "what's not" in those areas. In the last section, a chart rates the popularity of each covered topic within all 211 markets. Reliable, current, and well written, this vivid portrait of America painted in terms of consumer preferences and buying behavior should appeal to a wide audience. It is more suitable for circulating collections than for reference because it lacks an index. Highly recommended.
Leonard Grundt, Nassau Community Coll. Lib., Garden City, N.Y.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Little Brown and Company; First Edition edition (January 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316929085
• ISBN-13: 978-0316929080
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 7.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,746,824 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Loved it!, September 24, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Latitudes & Attitudes: An Atlas of American Tastes, Trends, Politics, and Passions: From Abilene, Texas to Zanesville, Ohio (Paperback)

Great info. A fun and creative way to look at market profiles. Only problem is that an update is needed as my copy was published in 1994, pre-Internet, etc.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Why a book so good can be out of print so soon?, November 9, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Latitudes and Attitudes: An Atlas of American Tastes, Trends, Politics, and Passions (Hardcover)

Michael Weiss's earlier book, The Clustering of America, was a very enlighting look on the social settings of America. It was tops, but he even did one better with LATITUDES & ATTITUDES. I have walls covered with books but this is one of the most coveted books of my guests once they open it. It is a reference book that you return to over and over. Bless Michael and all his loved ones!

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Amusing to peruse, frustrating to use., February 28, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Latitudes & Attitudes: An Atlas of American Tastes, Trends, Politics, and Passions: From Abilene, Texas to Zanesville, Ohio (Paperback)

This book is fun to flip through, but it's absolutely useless as a research tool, or for anything more than a quick laugh. The main reason for this is that it has no key. The same map of the 209 market areas is used on each page, but the different areas of the map are not identified. Say you've noticed that a small region in the deep south seems to have different "attitudes" than any of the other regions around it, and you want to look up the profile for this region to find out more about it. To do this, you have to guess approximately where in the country the area is (there are no state boundary lines on the map), go to your atlas and figure out which cities are in that general area, and then look in the profiles in the back, which are arranged alphabetically by metropolitan name. The only way to be sure that you've found the right region is to compare the shape of the area to the one on the map. This can be frustrating, especially since there are a couple of regions that have no profiles in the back of the book (I can only assume they were included as deliberate errors to protect the copyright of the maps).

In addition, the book doesn't give any actual numbers; it usually indicates whether a given region has above or below average consumption of a particular product, but doesn't say what the average consumption of that product is.

I understand why the given regions were used (they're the ones marketing analysts use), but for information about the large metropolitan centers of the west this book is pretty useless. Every little town in the southeast has it's own profile, while the LA region includes most of southern California.

Finally, some of the profiles in the back, especially the lists of "what's hot" and "what's not" don't appear to reflect the information given in the maps.

In short, this book is ultimately frustrating if you want to analyze the given information, even casually