One of the most interesting questions when it comes to consumer behavior is how city dwellers spend differently from those living in the suburbs or rural areas. Our newly launched UK cohort dashboards allow a deep dive into spend for the London region to complement our existing CSA-level analysis in the US. In today’s Insight Flash, we do a side-by-side comparison of spending in London, Los Angeles, and New York to see whether cities worldwide are more similar to each other than they are to surrounding areas.
At the industry level, there are many similarities across the three cities tracked, with some unsurprising differences as well. When looking at an exposure index for percent of spend from each city’s residents versus the percent of spend that city makes up in our overall panel, Luxury surfaces as a top area where spend is concentrated in New York and Los Angeles versus the rest of the US and in London versus the rest of the UK. This overindex is sharpest in Los Angeles, which makes up 2.35x as large a share of Luxury spending for the US as it does for spending overall. New York and London see levels of overindex similar to each other at 1.84x and 1.87x respectively. New York and London are also similar to each other in that they represent a larger concentration of Ground Transportation spend than any other industry – 2.70x its relative panel weight for New York and 2.33x for London. In auto-heavy Los Angeles, Ground Transportation spend is on par with levels in the US overall.
Top Industries
Digging into subindustries provides a more nuanced view. For instance, although Ground Transportation was a popular industry in both New York and London, New Yorkers are much more overindexed to Other Ground Transportation such as taxis by 5.68x, versus Ride-Sharing at 3.32x. Interestingly, the level of overindex for Ride-Sharing in London is similar to that in New York at 3.48x, but without the supplemental reliance on taxis. Some other interesting insights include a symbiotic overexposure to Other Home Products in London along with Self-Storage to house those products, and a higher tendency to spend on Casinos in Los Angeles which is a four-hour drive from Las Vegas. On the lower exposure side, Londoners seem much less likely to have pets than other UK residents, residents of warm Los Angeles spend less on utility bills than the overall US, and world-famous New York pizza from the corner pie shop leads to tracked pizza brands from larger chains underexposed versus the rest of the country.
Top Subindustries
Bottom Subindustries
