Wal-Mart's categorization of US consumers

The NYT has this piece on Wal-Mart's new strategy to recover lost ground over the past year, with the new slogan "Saving people money so they can live better lives." As part of this new approach, Wal-Mart customers have been divided up into three boxes:

There are “brand aspirationals” (people with low incomes who are obsessed with names like KitchenAid), “price-sensitive affluents” (wealthier shoppers who love deals), and “value-price shoppers” (who like low prices and cannot afford much more).

To cut through the marketing lingo, we are talking about the following categories:

1) Social climbers. People whose economic status relegates them to one class, but who very much aspire to become members of a higher class. As part of their aspirations, they latch on to typical "middle to upper-middle class" behaviors like buying Kitchenaid, Sony etc. This is calculated both to impress others and thus seek social validation for their aspirations, but also to create a positive sense of reinforcement within oneself about reaching that goal, or at least attainment of some of the accoutrements that accompany the desired status. Usually, these inividuals' worst nightmare would be that one of their friends caught on to the fact that aforementioned status symbols were purchased from Wal-Mart. It has to be fun to plan how to market to people who don't want anyone to know they shop at your store.

2) Frugal middle/upper-middle class consumers. These are the people who have gotten over the inferiority complex associated with shopping at Wal-Mart, and don't let their shopping decisions be complicated by notions that Wal-Mart is immoral. Mostly, they are just wise shoppers who don't have friends and family who will look down on them for shopping at Wal-Mart. Of course, some of these people live double lives, where they talk about how evil Wal-Mart is on the one hand, while they also go shopping there. We can call these people hypocrites.

3) Poor people. They have no choice about going to Wal-Mart, because that's all they can afford.