Many marketers covet Millennials, conducting extensive research on what makes these consumers tick and to better understand their personas. CivicScience recently took a different approach in researching this demographic group, to drum up some fresh insights about our beloved 18-34 year olds. We wanted to see if there are any regional differences that are noteworthy, so we mined our InsightStoreâ„¢ for anything that bubbled up.

Based on data collected over the past two years through June 20, 2014 on 248,231 respondents in this age group, we found a number of interesting geo-differences when we compared two segments: those living in the Northeastern U.S. and those in the Western U.S. (Full details of our methodology and the specific U.S. states studied is described in our newly published infographic.)

Infographic: Millennials - U.S. Northeast vs. West

Here are some of the highlights, with the percentages shown reflecting each segment’s comparison to each other:

Social Media

  • Northeastern U.S. Millennials are 32% more likely than Western U.S. Millennials to be on Twitter, 55% more likely to love using Snapchat, and 53% more likely to share sports news at least occasionally on social media.
  • Western Millennials are 33% more likely than the Northeasterners to love using Pinterest.

Sports and Entertainment

  • Northeastern U.S. Millennials seem to be overall more sports oriented. They are 2X more likely to follow the National Hockey League and 44% more likely to closely follow Major League Baseball. They are also 39% more likely to play fantasy sports.
  • Western U.S. Millennials generally keep things a bit lighter: They are 50% more likely to play video games daily; 32% more likely to prefer sitcoms when they watch TV (and less likely to prefer dramas); and 26% more likely to frequent movie theaters once a month or more.

Health and Lifestyle

  • Western U.S. Millennials are a bit contradictory here: While they are 69% more likely than Northeasterners to say they purchase locally grown food every chance they get and 25% more likely to pay attention to GMOs when doing their food purchasing, they are also 38% more likely to eat at fast-food restaurants at least once a week.

Brands Favored

Some consumer brands have greater appeal among Millennials who are Western-based vs. Northeastern. Here are a few that jumped out:

  • Northeastern U.S. Millennials are more likely to favor Panera Bread, Dunkin’ Donuts, Wendy’s, and Timberland.
  • Western U.S. Millennials are more likely to favor Costco, Jamba Juice, Red Robin, and Vans.

Check out our full infographic for visualizations of these and more insights that we found. We greatly enjoyed this data mining exercise and believe there can be a lot of benefit to regional segmentation and comparative insights for marketers.

Infographic - U.S. Millennials by Region