Changing Demography and Your Future

I stopped my Volvo Wagon at the top of our drive, got out to retrieve the mail and got back in the car. We get a lot of mail. My two daughters aged eleven and fourteen chorused “Anything for me?” I thumbed through the stack and determined that they both had received letters addressed to them with coupons from their favorite clothing retailer and passed the envelopes to the back seat where they were ripped open. Then begins the drill. I am very familiar with the process because the retailer keeps these snail mail incentives coming with train schedule regularity. “Dad, can you take us to Bob’s?” This is not a real question because they know I’m trapped. How else will we save all the money reflected in the coupons?

There is a lesson here. Consider that my daughters are pretty typical. They have Ipods, laptops, DVD players and cell phones. They instant message, text message, voice message and talk on their cells with a vengeance. They watch DVDs and listen to downloaded music. They do watch a little television but the amount of time spent in front of commercial broadcast/cable TV is declining significantly. They don’t listen to broadcast radio or read newspapers at all. So who cares? Marketers care, really care. Why? Because they can’t Brand or for that matter even reach this new generation, aged twenty-two and under, with any of the usual bag of advertising/marketing media. Gen Y has the potential of being the most consuming generation in the history of the United States, perhaps the world. They will be 100 million strong when the generation ends in 2010. They are consuming at 500% of the levels of their parents, age for age, in adjusted dollars. The fact that marketers can’t brand them borders on tragedy. In case you haven’t heard, consumer brand name preference is dropping like a stone. It’s no wonder when you consider that the largest and only emerging US consumer market, Generation Y, is very difficult to reach with commercial/branding/advertising messages, even on the internet.

This brings me back to the top of my driveway. Generation Y loves direct snail mail. I know this seems strange in a cyber age but if you need to brand Gen Y and you are not using the US Post Office you have rocks in your head. You also might want to consider billboards/outdoor advertising because Gen Y does not ride or drive blindfolded.