The Age Curve: How to Profit from the Coming Demographic Storm
288
The Age Curve: How to Profit from the Coming Demographic Storm
288Paperback
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780814417942 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | AMACOM |
| Publication date: | 06/25/2008 |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Kenneth W. Gronbach is a nationally recognized expert in the field of demography and generational marketing. He regularly provides counsel to Fortune 500 companies as well as large and small businesses across the U.S.
Read an Excerpt
INTRODUCTION
There are sick empty feelings in your stomach, and then there are really big sick empty feelings. I had the latter. Our signature account of eight years, American Honda Motorcycle, had shipped the year’s allotment of new 1986 bikes to the dealers two months earlier and a unique thing happened: nothing.
Our history with Honda had been nothing but successful up to this point. The formula was simple: Honda sent the bikes from Japan to a New Jersey warehouse, where they were distributed to the Northeast regional dealers, who prepped them and displayed them on showroom floors. As soon as they were displayed at the dealerships, the marketing and advertising kicked in and the customers bought them—all of them. Life was good.
But this was 1986 and the bikes did not sell. It wasn’t that traffic was slow. There was no traffic. The folks at Honda asked, “Did you run the ads?”
This is when the really big sick empty feeling kicked in. The bad news was that sales volume was dropping like a stone. The really bad news was that sales would continue to drop for the next six years until the decline amounted to an 80 percent free fall. Gulp. By 1992 most of the dealerships were ready to close, and we lost the account. No surprise there. The only consolation was that exactly the same thing happened to Yamaha, Suzuki, and Kawasaki. Someone had turned off the faucet and we didn’t know who or why.
In mid-October 1996 I was reading the Hartford Courant’s editorial section. The Hartford Courant is America’s oldest newspaper in continuous publication. It devoted a full page to a sweeping indictment of Generation X and its noninvolvement in the political process. Bill Clinton was about to trounce Bob Dole. It seemed that the Xers (born between 1965 and 1984) did not vote or donate its resources at the same level the Boomers did (born between 1945 and 1964) when they first got involved in politics.
The implied laziness part bothered me. We had thirty Xers working at our agency at the time, and none were lazy. I asked our research department to review the voting habits of Generation X. Our research department checked. All the factors seemed equal on a per capita basis. Xers did vote. They did contribute to their political parties and they did participate in government. There were just fewer of them. In other words, the young Generation X voters actually cast fewer votes than the young Boomers when they were the same age not because they were lazy but because they were simply a smaller group.
Was this simple difference in the size of the Boomer generation and Generation X the answer to the motorcycle mystery? I reviewed U.S. Census Bureau data to find out, and indeed there were a lot fewer of them—11 percent fewer. There were 78 million Boomers and only 69 million Xers.
That moment of recognition changed my thinking from that point forward. Large and small generations, alternately moving and aging through the marketplace, determine many a company’s success or failure. That moment changed the way I counsel my client companies. It spawned the shape of my public presentations. It gave birth to this book.
The core idea of this book is quite simple: Smaller generations buy less stuff; larger generations buy more stuff. When a large generation, such as the Boomers, leaves the market and is replaced by a smaller generation, such as Gen Xers, sales are going to drop. Please excuse the fact that I repeat this premise throughout my book, but I have found that people (executives, entrepreneurs, salespeople, marketers, advertisers, etc.) just don’t accept this clear-cut concept until you beat them over the head with it. My intention is to show how the simple idea of generational size applies to an ever-widening variety of areas and convince readers to recognize it, believe it, and, most important, put it to use.
—Kenneth W. Gronbach
Table of Contents
CONTENTS
FOREWORD XI
INTRODUCTION XV
A WORD FROM THE AUTHOR XVIII
PART ONE: THE PARADE OF GENERATIONS: WHY AREN’T MARKETERS PAYING ATTENTION?
1 The Generational Impact on Supply and Demand 3
2 Who Are These People? 11
3 Bell Curves, Pies, and Your “Best Customer” 19
4 Case Study: Detroit, Japan, and the Best Customers for Cars 25
PART TWO: THE OLDER GENERATIONS
5 Silent Virtues: A Small Group with Its Own Impact 37
6 Case Study: How the “Graying Of America” Myth
Will Take Down the Assisted-Living Industry 43
PART THREE: THE BABY BOOMERS: THE RADICAL-CHANGE GENERATION AND ITS IMPACT ON TODAY AND TOMORROW
7 The Boomers: Mass, Money, and Motivation 57
8 What Boomers Will Buy 65
9 Boomers Will Not Get Old 69
10 The Boomer Economy: Of Credit Cards and Gift Cards 75
11 Of Course You Can Afford It! 81
12 Social Security and Private Health Care: Dead But Not Buried 89
13 Wal-Mart Hits a Wall—A Great Wall 97
14 Media’s Slow Death: The End of Marketing As We Know It 105
PART FOUR: GENERATION X: THE OUTSIZE EXPECTATIONS OF A SMALL GENERATION
15 Quit Picking on the Xers! 111
16 The Cause and Effect of a Small Generation 117
17 The X Factor: Where Have All the Workers Gone? 123
18 The Gen X Labor Shortage and the Impact on Direct Mail 137
19 Case Study: How Generation X Drove Motorcycle Sales off the Cliff 141
20 Case Study: Planes Stuck on the Ground—A Business Traveler’s Tale 153
21 Case Study: The Death of a Discount Store 159
PART FIVE: GENERATION Y: THE GIANT ON THE HORIZON
22 Stop Looking in the Rearview Mirror! 165
23 The Great Y Ahead: More of Everything 179
24 Marketing to Generation Y 185
25 Case Study: No Leg to Stand On—A Levi’s Footnote 195
26 Schools, Taxes, and the Future 201
27 Generation Y’s Leading Legacy 209
PART SIX: THE GENERATION IMPACT OF SOCIAL ISSUES
28 The Bigotry Is Almost Gone—A Boomer’s Perspective 219
29 Coming to America: Melting Into the World’s Melting Pot 227
30 Macro and Micro Conclusions 237
APPENDIX A 243
APPENDIX B 247
APPENDIX C 255
APPENDIX D 259
INDEX 263
ABOUT THE AUTHOR 269