The theory of the experience milieus traces back to the Bamberg sociologist Gerhard Schulze ("Die Erlebnisgesellschaft - Kultursoziologie der Gegenwart", 1992), who pointed out, that distinguishing people according to their demography and social background becomes more and more irrelevant in the today’s affluent society.
Lifestyle is less and less specified by affiliation to a defined class or group. Indicators for lifestyle today are leisure, culture, music and theme interests themselves, which only partly correlate with social strata. Gerhard Schulze approved this working hypothesis already in 1985 with a regional limited basis study surveying 1,014 respondents. In the result of this survey, he found the five experience milieus.

By conducting several representative studies our corporate association retraced these five experience milieus starting with a survey of 2,000 respondents from the age of 14. Thus, the milieu definitions have been established and in different studies a lot of respondents could be assigned to the five types.
Basically, these five experience milieus are characterized by completely different leisure activities, cultural interests, preferences for music styles, reading interests and preferred TV genres.
For marketing purposes the experience milieus are quite important because it is only one or two types that focus on a special brand. The reason therefore is the fact that brands and their advertisement also represent experience groups, which are attracted by special milieus and refused by others.
On the basis of the work of Gerhard Schulze the German population from the age of 14 can be divided into five experience milieus regarding to their preferred experiences.

Each brand is mainly defined according to its position within the five experience milieus. By comparing this positioning with those of a competitor ideal target positions for marketing strategies can be derived. To provide these analyses for a wide range of brands our institute integrates the five experience milieus in a lot of representative studies. There they can be used for target group, marketing and media analyses.

The self-realisation milieu, for example, represents people with multiple interests doing active leisure activities. With the tendency to be younger or feeling like that they hang around in popular places, bistros, cafes, enjoy listening to Soul and Blues and do not at all want to become part of the crowd. They distance themselves from all kinds of bad education, narrow-mindedness and conventions.

The entertainment-milieu is as young as the self-realisation milieu but less intellectual. It favours a life containing action and tension, enjoys visiting football stadiums for live matches, bars, clubs and cinemas, is partial to action films on TV or on video while eating fast food or a pizza for a quick bite and hearing the Rock and Pop top charts. They dislike conservatism, traditional housewives and slow drivers.

Perfection and striving for influence and position is the philosophy of the high-level milieu. The level of culture and education, income and desires meet high standards. Since these people are highly interested in further education, politics and events of the day they read newspapers, journals and books. They hate fakelore and yellow press topics.

The main characteristics of the harmony milieu are a feeling of security, cosiness and balance. These are mainly elder people having little relation to education and science, but much more to folkloristic music. They are tradition-conscious and do not leave their homes for long, but are getting informed by newspapers and journals.

The integration milieu is characterised by its ambition for conformity and perfection. These distinctively ordinary people are slightly younger than the ones of the harmony milieu. They have a conservative approach and are mainly interested in yellow press topics, shallow entertainment and German Schlager.