Nerds won’t fail you, online retailers

Whoever it was that claimed the geeks would inherit the Earth obviously had a premonition about Bill Gates. But if any proof was needed that socially awkward Star Trek fanatics cannot be ignored, television channel Sci Fi has released a survey showing how potentially valuable nerds are to marketers.

The Sci Fi Geekforce Report shows that there are approximately 6.9 million self-proclaimed geeks in the UK, predominantly ABC1 males (though about 33 per cent of the core group are female). This group spends &£8.2bn a year on their hobbies, although quite how you spend so much money memorising the words to the first three Star Wars films and sitting in Games Workshop moving goblins around a board is a mystery to the Diary.

The report certainly seems to have highlighted a gap in the market, particularly for e-tailers, as 81 per cent of geeks surveyed claimed that the internet is their first port of call for product or brand research. Astonishingly, the survey shows that “87 per cent of geeks say that friends come to them for their opinions”. The Diary has checked and rechecked, and that is not a misprint. “Friends” is indeed used in the plural.