202 The history of the data economy exchanged information on their customers, to predict in 1996, and eventually became part of international process saw American credit bureau Equifax expand into the field of marketing by acquiring data companies segment people not only into creditworthy and uncreditworthy, but also into marketing categories, such Geodemographics, the ability to sort people into demographic and consumer categories linked to where they lived, emerged in the 1970s from newly available, The Claritas Corporation, founded in 1971, sorted Americans into 40 types, including money and brains scientist Richard Webber used the 1971 census to Classification of Residential Neighbourhoods (CRN) system formed the basis for the Acorn system later used by data company CACI1 experimental work being done within companies and From diesel to jet fuel qualitative and quantitative methods to define and explore questions, designing experiments almost like Even in the early days, when analysis was done with log tables and slide rules, and questionnaires were hand-tabulated on paper, sophisticated statistical models underpinned the work of Barnard and his captures consumers attitudes to a brand or product in Timandra Harkness is a presenter, writer and ways, the model helps predict the change in sales or comedian, and author of Big data: does size matter? Cluster analysis could segment people by interests and with a particular statement: I like going on holiday; 1989199519 40 Impact ISSUE 34 2021_pp38-41_DataEconomy.indd 40 18/06/2021 13:52