Woody Allen and Sylvester Stallone bear a strong resemblance - at least if one is to believe traditional socio-demographic target group systems referring merely to variables such as sex, age, education or income. After all, aren't they both roughly the same age, male and in the same line of business? And yet: doesn't it seem practically out of the question that these two would have the same taste, buy similar products or even eat in the same restaurant? In today's world, demographic criteria is not sufficient to explain consumer behavior.

To know one’s target group today, means to know,

which habits, environmental conditions, which basic attitudes, motivations and needs

influence their individual attitudes. If one chooses to ignore this kind of information, one will not be able, in most cases, to satisfactorily determine why one’s own product is either preferred or rejected, for which lifestyle the make’s positioning is suited, where there’d be chances for growth, and from where one would have to expect risks. Furthermore, the intensity of product usage, which is often mentioned in addition to demographics in order to describe target groups, can only marginally reflect the chances for growth or erosion.

Because more than ever (this too is general knowledge) market preferences respectively the act of purchasing reflects the buyers’ attitudes towards life, their social and political values (e.g. environmental and health consciousness), their desire to set themselves apart, or conform to others, expressing the identification with either certain specified- or their own demands, their commitment to pleasure or the desire to object. Today it is even possible to chose among low price offers.

The “Social Milieus” research approach, which has been, to a large extent, co-developed by Jörg Ueltzhöffer, one of the two founders of SIGMA, systemizes this diversity of everyday life worlds. Milieus describe people and their specific attitudes and life orientations, and outline social groups, whose value orientations, goals in life, lifestyles – and thus also their basic method of consumption – are sufficiently similar. The goal of the milieu analysis is to “paint a complete picture” of people, as a network of many different influences, which, analyzed independent from each other, could never adequately describe behavioral attitudes.

The starting point for these ideas, was to give the customer the possibility to display his subjective reality without any external influences and the most amount of freedom. He himself gets to describe what is important in his life, what only interests him marginally, - or doesn’t interest him in the least. He describes the every day life world from his point of view, opens the door to his apartment to show us what his subjective reality actually looks like, and through that forms a basis for the development of “statement clusters” with which one can then produce individual research segments („SIGMA Milieus“).

Measuring social status against basic value orientation has proven to be an optimal way to depict these milieus. Here, the social statusvalue orientation, depicted on the horizontal x-axis, represents the textual classification of the social groups, like different lifestyles, desires and goals, spirituality/religion, attitudes towards work, efficiency and much more describes the formal classification as a summery of the objective (mostly demographic) characteristics, e.g. level of education, job, income etc. The .

Already in the early 90s it became apparent that the purely German view of society allowed for the definition of status, yet was not able to deliver adequately dependable prognoses. Being able to recognize trends in such a timely fashion that a business can react to them with adequate offers, means they have to be detected as early as possible. This in turn means being able to determine even the smallest deviation in behavior as a future norm – a task bearing a great potential for error. This kind of risk can be reduced if these (still) small deviations can be observed in other countries as well, or have already evolved.

Thus the model of the social milieus was expanded by SIGMA initially to include all of Europe, followed by the US, Asia (Japan, SEA, MAINLAND China, Taiwan), Australia and South Africa.

The global segmentation of markets has led to the definition of “SIGMA Transnational Consumer Cultures®“ in Europe, and corresponding models for the US, Japan and Mainland China. The trick here was to understand that in all 4 major cultures comparable value structure can be depicted, even if they can’t be defined through a row of identical statements or identical lifestyles. The postmodern Japanese operationalizes his values according to his cultural tradition, local lifestyles and certainly to the given possibilities, just like the post modern American will present himself differently than the German one according to his social upbringing and environment. It is of deciding importance to recognize the common value structure, and thus the socio culturally related target groups beyond national and regional boundaries, without forgetting to take into consideration the necessary information regarding national and regional peculiarities which are important to marketing decisions. The model for the intercultural formation of milieus is being continually updated since 1996 and regularly quantified.