On Sunday, I had lunch with Mary Edrington, my former marketing professor from Drake. She was one of the best teachers I ever had, because she did the near-impossible: she made me care about boring numbers. Even though I was much more attuned to the creative side of marketing, I always appreciated her zeal for research. It wasn’t enough to come up with a clever slogan for some product; you had to prove that there was actually a customer out there to buy it.
At lunch, she asked me who the average reader of johnaugust.com was. I confessed that I didn’t really know. I can speculate about education level of some readers based on the comments. Checking the logs, I can tell you what browser he or she uses. But my actual demographic data is an empty set.
So if you don’t mind, would you be willing to answer 10 really simple questions? I’ve timed it — it only takes 35 seconds, unless you write a big essay in the (optional) final comment box.
You can take the survey here. (Update March 2011: Link removed, outdated.)
After a week or two, I’ll put up the results.