CDRC’s Map of the Month for July 2018 is a map of Consumer Vulnerability, showing a geodemographic classification developed by CDRC in Leeds.
Some consumers are more vulnerable to marketing practices due to their personal traits such as age, health or household makeup. This vulnerability varies by product and industry. Consumer vulnerability here is defined as the risk that a consumer’s mental, physical or financial welfare may be damaged when engaging in a market interaction.
While consumer vulnerability has been discussed at length in academic literature and regulatory guidelines, there has not been a comprehensive geographical assessment of consumer vulnerability in the United Kingdom. This study creates a geodemographic classification of consumer vulnerability at output area level.
The interactive map is available to browse here.
Further details about the work, including the methodology and the data itself, is available here. This work was completed by Michael Adcock, alongside Nik Lomax and Stephen Clark, as part of his internship at Leeds Institute for Data Analytics.