Why It No Longer “Plays In Peoria”

“Will it play in Peoria?”

It’s one of retail’s older questions – now gone general use such that it gets asked anytime almost any product plans to expand – though most people don’t know why they ask it.

Horatio Alger – the 19th century’s most prolific writer about the American Dream – is the person who first put the phrase to paper and made it popular. However, it predates him – he took it from various vaudeville players who use Peoria as a benchmark for whether or not their acts would work. Peoria kept its status as the place to test if a product would “play” well nationwide and even saw it enshrined when Peoria became one of the nation’s preeminent test markets during the last two decades of the 2oth century .

So why the national obsession with Peoria, Illinois – a city with a little over 100,000 people in it nestled nearly dead center in the mid-western state it calls home?  Why did the world need to know if would play in Peoria?

The simple answer, historically speaking, is that Peoria is literally the most normal place in the United States.  Often hailed for its “mid-western values” and “wonderful averageness” (Horatio Alger’s words, not ours)  – a centrally located city in a centrally located state, something about Peoria screamed “an excellent place to discover a national median” to everyone who passed through it for about a 150 years.

But when the 90s came to an end, our official national interest in Peoria began to wane with it.  Test markets moved on – Boise, Idaho; Albany, New York; Greensboro, North Carolina; and Santa Barbara, California have all long since eclipsed good old Peoria when it comes to brands trying to get a feeling of what the national temperature will be on a product.  We may not yet ask, “is it baller in Boise?” or “awesome in Albany?” or “good in Greensboro?” yet – but that may have something to do with the fact we have a 200 year old tradition of talking about Peoria in this country (and with the fact that Peoria is an objectively more fun word to say).

So how did Peoria lose its spot in the driver’s seat of testing products? Quite simply – it became less representative of America as a whole.

“The complicated part of the Peoria story is that Peoria didn’t change that much. The mill didn’t close and the demographics didn’t change.  But the nation’s demographics did,” RetailPsyche data scientist Jerry Decker told PYMNTS.

As the old millennium gave way to the new one, the American shopping experience had changed enough that Peoria wasn’t a good way to track for two reasons. The first is what we noted – its demographics ended up a poor match.

There Are No Truly Representative Cities 

“The reason people used to be obsessed with test markets is that it was the only way to get a fix on “the average consumer.” And for all of commerce until – let’s say the last 25 years – hitting that sort of amorphous average was the goal because it was the best one could hope for.”

The last two decades have been different precisely because retailers can do better.  Instead of using “random locations” as a stand-in for the United States as a whole, the golden era of data science we live in means retailers can ask questions directly that they used to only be able to model indirectly.

“So I sell razor blades in 1980 – and I want to sell to the average American male – so I go to my test city and I see, yep, this is how many men of this age buy my brand. Or how many married men,” Decker explained.  “But that is why a typical city mattered so much – you would use those ratios to tell you who to market to, where to sell.  Well, now retailers can just skip the step – and ask the data the questions they want to know directly.  You don’t have to find out about your test market and extrapolate to the United States as a whole.”

Test markets aren’t a total thing of the past – but they are simply less crucial in the face of analytics.  Retailers need them – and need them to be representative – especially when it comes time to test real world rollouts.

“There is no way to model the answer to the question “will consumers buy it?” if it is never sold to consumers.”

But the early intel and data gathering about a brand’s prospects as a whole – that has become less tethered to the testing cities.  It used to be much harder to look at mass swaths of consumer behavior than it is today – which means the modeling in micro is just less necessary.

Urban Vs Not Is The Main Demographic Divide 

‘We tend to think about differences regionally as the most important. Do people in the West really buy more kale – or I don’t know.  But when we looked at our data, what we saw is that it a lot more what type of community you live in within a state than which region it’s in.  Atlanta and San Francisco have more in common than Atlanta and Irwinton, Georgia.”

For those who’ve never heard of it – Irwinton is a rural community in Georgia with 571 residents.  There is no Uber in Irwniton, or InstaCart – though high-speed internet service was added (recently,) and as of 2014 they have full 3G coverage.

Shoppers in Iriwnton have a lot in common with other ultra-rural consumers in the United States – they’ve had access to smartphone technology that works full time for less than 3 years, they may have heard of some of the unicorns we write about here but have no regular interaction with them, and they are really getting into eCommerce (and shopping on Amazon in particular) over the last few years.

“If we look at rural areas, out data is seeing eCommerce numbers that are on the rise faster than anywhere else – and staple household goods ordered online are the leader. These orders are mostly mobile – which indicates that households who are getting their first full-time internet access in rural communities are making eCommerce transitions almost immediately.”

Urban areas are also seeing spikes and very fast mobile growth, but what’s getting bought is different. Urban consumers are buying plenty of goods on mobile – though larger shopping engagements with cart sizes over $250 are still mostly happening in desktop environments.

“When consumers are making buys under $250, mobile shopping is on the rise. Over $250, a lot of that growth drops off, and urban consumers are more likely to start the buy on their phone, but finish it off on a computer.”

The big pick-up in mobile numbers is when it comes to services. Hailing rides, booking appointments and purchasing delivery are all much more likely to be done on a phone. And those services are only available in urban areas.

“I think when you are looking for the big divide – urban consumers are more likely to use their phones as personal assistants. Rural users’ smartphone use is more consistent with urban users’ desktop use.”

Which isn’t to say there aren’t things that unite shoppers nationwide.

“Paper towels. Americans everywhere are buying staggering numbers of paper towels each week – from all walks of life, all states, all environments.  That was the most surprising take-away. According to our data – the average American household is using 3 rolls of paper towels per week. Urban, suburban, rural, didn’t matter.”

Americans, our eCommerce habits vary widely, but at base we’re all mostly concerned with wiping up the mess before it gets out of hand.