In suburban Orange County, California, Ladera Ranch is a thriving planned community of more than 16,000 people, where various villages are not customized to practical needs, but to what marketers call different "values subcultures".
"The survey went to thousands of people who'd called a number on highway billboards announcing that Ladera Ranch, a new planned community in Orange County, Calif., was coming soon.
It asked predictable marketing questions, such as whether people wanted ballfields or trails. Then came a section titled 'values.'"
"'We were trying to characterize the lens through which people see the world,' said Brooke Warrick, who heads Ladera's marketing firm, American Lives. 'A community is a collection of symbols and images. And we wanted our symbols and images to be better than the other guy's.'
As the largest building boom since the 1950s continues across the suburban frontier, the story of Ladera Ranch offers an extreme example of how developers are using the kind of sophisticated market research more commonly used to sell Hummers or Cornflakes to build the very places people live, and in a sense, to try to socially engineer community."
Thanks to Tom Petty
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