Conventional Family Life ^© refers to the pattern of responses offered by respondents who represent the core of "middle Australia", with values centred around the significant events in their personal and family lives. It tends to relate to people seeking greater financial security, struggling to improve their basic living standards and give their families better opportunities than they had in their own childhood.

Within the Conventional Family Life ^© segment exists the great Australian dream of owning your own home in the suburbs, driving a good, solid car (a white Holden Commodore of course), having 2.5 children and going on family BBQ's on the weekend. But with this comes the worry of a mortgage, playing it safe at work so you don't risk losing your job, worrying about the safety of the children, being the family taxi service and ferrying the kids to and from T-Ball, Basketball, their friends place and making sure there are always cookies on the table when the kids bring their friends home from school.

Good, solid and reliable products are important with Conventional Family Life ^©. Generally seeking value for money in their purchases, they select a mixture of branded, longer life and generic or store brands for everyday use. They often have to make compromises in quality due to price, but they like to know what they're buying and its important that it will always be the same. This drives them to places like McDonalds where they always know what they'll get and they know the kids will enjoy it. This doesn't only apply to products. When they take out loans, for instance, they like to know how much they will have to pay not what the interest rate is. When faced between a choice of A and B, they will tend to choose the safest option, the one they know the most about.

A warm, friendly and caring segment, trust is important to them as is how they "feel" about a product or company. As a consequence, many of the advertisements targeted to this segment feature highly emotive visuals and jingles, particularly relating to children - who are the central focus of their life, whether they have them yet or not.

Not having a great deal of time outside of family activities and earning a living, this segment tends to be light readers of newspapers in general. An interest in the local community, however, leads to higher than average readership of suburban newspapers.

Whilst they are also light readers of magazines in total, their interest in the home and family results in higher than average readership for homemaker magazines such as Better Homes & Gardens & Super Food Ideas, parenting magazines such as Mother & Baby and major women's magazines such as Woman's Day, Women's Weekly and That’s Life.

Television viewing is average. They enjoy the vicarious excitement of The Price is Right and following the contestants on Australian Idol, and the light "drama" of how other families cope in soaps such as Days of our Lives and Home & Away. ER and CSI are other popular Conventional Family Life^© programmes, where crises are dealt with on a regular basis, middle Australian/American values are retained and daily issues are explored in depth.

* Developed in conjunction with Colin Benjamin - ^© The Horizons Network 1997.