ACORN (demographics)

Acorn, developed by CACI Limited in London, is a segmentation tool which categorises the United Kingdom’s population into demographic types. It has been built by analysing significant social factors and population behaviour to provide precise information and in-depth understanding of the different types of people and communities across the UK. Acorn segments households, postcodes and neighbourhoods into 6 categories, 18 groups and 62 types.

In March 2014 CACI launched the latest version of Acorn. This took the marketing and demographic industry by surprise largely because the necessary data from the 2011 census was not available for the whole of the UK. The current version of Acorn has been created using a unique and radically different approach to geodemographics. It does not rely on census data, but takes advantage of the new data environment created by government policies on Open data and the availability of a number of brand new private sector datasets. Peter Sleight, Chair of Association of Census Distributors said "The new Acorn has revolutionised geodemographics". At The Census & Geodemographics Group’s decennial conference, Tracking a Decade of Changing Britain, CACI presented a paper on why they had chosen to eschew Census data and how they had gone about developing a new way of creating a demographic segmentation.

Traditionally (since the 1970s), all geodemographic segmentations and classifications were built in broadly the same way. A good example of this is the Output Area Classification (OAC). The first OAC was developed in 2005 by the University of Leeds in cooperation with the UK Office for National Statistics' (ONS). It is a free and open geodemographic segmentation based on the 2001 UK Census. Currently, at University College London, the OAC is being rebuilt using the 2011 UK Census.

In the traditional approach census and lifestyle data is fed through statistical software to perform a multi-variate segmentation. The resulting segmentation is analysed, named and described.

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