INTERVIEW PROF. RICHARD WEBBER
Understanding your catchment: The power of geodemographics for gyms
How did you become involved in geodemographics? My work began with a project examining
deprivation in Liverpool. The city council had tried ranking neighbourhoods simply by level of deprivation, but because so many neighbourhoods were at a similar level, this wasn’t very useful in deciding which services should go where. Instead, I used census data and cluster analysis to group neighbourhoods into types based on the characteristics of the people living there. We quickly discovered that different neighbourhood types used the city’s services very differently. We then began to apply the analysis nationally and for all neighbourhoods, not only the disadvantaged ones. Connecting our neighbourhood classi cations with market research, we started to identify striking patterns. For example, people who read The Guardian tended to live in very different neighbourhoods from those who read The Telegraph, even though levels of af uence were similar. The same applied to leisure activities: golf and tennis, for instance, were played by people with similar levels of af uence, but living in quite different types of neighbourhood. What did you do with this insight? Once we realised neighbourhood types could be linked to customer behaviour and market research data, we began to look at commercial applications and formalised our system as ACORN and, later, as MOSAIC. These geodemographic systems were designed to assign a type to every neighbourhood in the country. Retailers began using the classi cations to decide where to locate stores, while marketing teams used them to target advertising and direct mail.
Prof. Richard Webber is one of the pioneers of geodemographic profiling. The creator of ACORN and MOSAIC – two of the most widely-used neighbourhood classification systems – he has spent decades helping organisations understand how the characteristics of local populations influence behaviour. Around 15 years ago, he went on to develop ORIGINS , a system that analyses names to understand and map cultural heritage, which can dovetail with MOSAIC to unlock additional insights. Here, he explains how geodemographics have evolved – and the relatively untapped opportunities that still exist for gyms and leisure operators.
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STATE OF THE UK FITNESS INDUSTRY REPORT 2026
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