Whilst enjoying a well deserved cuppa here at Comparisonville we found ourselves debating who we most compare ourselves to when it comes to benchmarking our success. Celebs? Friends? The next door neighbours?… And we wondered what relevance the old adage "keeping up with the joneses" still had in today's society.

Some of the boffins amongst us grabbed their clipboards and hit the streets talking to people and gathering highly scientific data. Then they studied, studied and studied some more. They said 'hmmmm...' and 'that's interesting' a lot before finally, after calculating formulas and drawing diagrams, they revealed their findings!

• 39% of people surveyed most compare their success against their friends. Only 4% used their neighbours as a benchmark and surprisingly just 2% referred to celebrities!
• 35% admitted to telling fibs about their social life to impress their friends and 32% admitted to telling fibs about their salary or qualifications to impress their boss!
• Women were found to be more jealous than men and were 10% more likely to secretly resent their friends success.
• 36% deemed your job and your home as being the biggest symbol of success, interestingly only 3% said that a flash car meant you were successful!
• And being considered a successful entrepreneur held the supreme accolade with 43% of people surveyed saying that it was highly impressive.

So ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ doesn’t seem to be all that relevant anymore. Who is a typical ‘Jones’ today anyway? And do we really want to be like them? We analysed our data of more than 8 million people and started to build up a picture of today’s typical Mr Jones. But before we reveal all, why not complete our little questionnaire below to see how much like a typical Jones you are?…

Click here to download the Joneses Research Summary PDF.