Emerging Consumers

As you prob­a­bly know, tra­di­tion­ally, the “sweet spot” for most mar­keters has been the con­sumers who occupy the cov­eted 18–34 age bracket. While is has become a commonly-accepted ‘fact’ that this group spends and spends fre­quently, the REAL FACT being over­looked by many Amer­i­can mar­keters is that 18–34 is not the only demo­graphic “sweet spot.” There is another group of con­sid­er­able size, pos­sess­ing far more spend­ing power, that’s almost ignored in the strate­gic plans of many of our most promi­nent marketers.

Who are these “emerg­ing” con­sumers fly­ing under today’s mar­ket­ing radar screen? Why, they’re just our Baby Boomers. Con­sumers age 40 to 70, nearly 100 mil­lion strong, with annual spend­ing power of more than $2.1 tril­lion — seven times the spend­ing power of Gen­er­a­tions X and Y combined.

Recent stud­ies prove Baby Boomers still have what it takes in the spend­ing department:

• Peo­ple over 40 spend 65% more than any other age group
• The aver­age house­hold buys 13 cars in a life­time – nine of them after age 40
• One of Nintendo’s fastest grow­ing new prod­ucts is Wii Bowl­ing. Their biggest cus­tomers? Retire­ment homes. They call it “Wii-habbing”
• The 45–75 age group spent $97 bil­lion in house­hold fur­nish­ings and $32 bil­lion in the drug cat­e­gory in 2004, 14% and 148% more, respec­tively, than con­sumers age 44 and under
• The aver­age age of a Harley David­son buyer is 48

Enter thirdgear, a Chicago-based mar­ket­ing con­sul­tancy with a fresh new focus on the Baby Boomer gen­er­a­tion. thirdgear, in part­ner­ship with Mil­len­nium, a UK-based adver­tis­ing agency, is com­mit­ted to its mis­sion of bring­ing mar­keters closer to the mil­lions of con­sumers over 40 who helped set the tone for today’s con­sumer landscape.

thirdgear has cre­ated a pro­pri­etary panel of con­sumers over 40 called gear­heads. These active, highly involved, highly opin­ion­ated think tankers are not shy about shar­ing their ideas and opin­ions on about every­thing from prod­uct design to pack­ag­ing to advertising.

And, in response to this boom­ing mar­ket, thirdgear co-founded IMMN, the Inter­na­tional Mature Mar­ket­ing Net­work. The association’s mis­sion is to cham­pion mature mar­ket­ing around the world and cur­rently has mem­bers from Aus­tralia, New Zealand, Japan, Eng­land and the United States, includ­ing noted mar­ket­ing con­sul­tants and authors such as Marti Bar­letta and Dick Stroud.

To learn more about thirdgear, check out their Web site, www.thirdgear.com or reach out to Jenna at 773.715.0879 or jenna@snackboxlabs.com.