How to Buy

Request a Community Tapestry CD and Poster

ZIP Lookup Tool Enter ZIP Code: Identify the top three dominant Community Tapestry segments in any ZIP Code. ESRI’s Community Tapestry segmentation system compares national data figures for population, housing, and income to those of the dominant Tapestry segments in each ZIP Code. This information helps you locate underserved markets, find your best customer types, and target your mailings and advertising campaigns.

News and Events Subscribe to BusinessGeoInfo to learn how GIS brings the geographic advantage to businesses worldwide. It's free.

Community Tapestry, ESRI's market segmentation system, classifies U.S. neighborhoods into 65 segments based on their socioeconomic and demographic composition. Segmentation explains customer diversity, describes lifestyles and lifestages, and incorporates a wide range of data such as demographic, business, and market potential data.

Built by ESRI's data development team, Community Tapestry represents the fourth generation of market segmentation systems that began 30 years ago. A large array of attributes from the most powerful data available captures the subtlety and vibrancy of U.S. neighborhoods. Sources include data from Census 2000, ESRI’s proprietary demographic updates, the InfoBase consumer database from Acxiom Corporation, the national consumer survey from Mediamark Research Inc. Doublebase 2005, and other sources.

With Community Tapestry, you can

• Profile your customers.
• Determine who your most profitable customers are.
• Define your merchandise mix.
• Raise your direct mail response rates.
• Reveal underserved markets.

The Community Tapestry segmentation system provides an accurate, detailed description of U.S. neighborhoods. These residential areas are divided into 65 segments [PDF] based on demographic variables such as age, income, home value, occupation, household type, education, and other consumer behavior characteristics.

To increase the versatility and analytical value of Community Tapestry, segments are organized into 12 LifeMode Summary Groups [PDF] with similar demographics and consumer patterns and 11 Urbanization Summary Groups [PDF] with similar levels of density. Neighborhoods with the most similar characteristics are grouped together, and neighborhoods showing divergent characteristics are separated.

Why Use Community Tapestry?

Segmentation systems operate on the theory that people with similar tastes, lifestyles, and behaviors seek others with the same tastes—hence the adage "like seeks like." These behaviors can be measured, predicted, and targeted. Community Tapestry combines the "who" of lifestyle demography with the "where" of local neighborhood geography to create a model of various lifestyle classifications, or segments, of actual neighborhoods with addresses—distinct behavioral market segments.