Marketing Communications

126 CHAPTER 4 TARGET GROUPS

Baby boomers were born in the years immediately aft er the Second World War. North

America and Europe in particular saw a huge boom in the number of births in these years.

Today baby boomers are aged between 45 and 65 years and form a large and wealthy group

of consumers. As a group they prefer quality products and tend not to look for bargains

(unlike their parents), on average they have few children and more women go out to work.^17

Th is makes baby boomers an ideal market for luxury and high-quality products, as well as for

products for working households: a smaller car meant as the second family car, easy-to-prepare

meals, child minders, etc.

From 1965 to 1980 birth rates in the USA and Europe declined, due inter alia to eff ective

contraception and an increased number of divorces; people born during this period are

referred to as baby busters, generation X or X’ers.^18 Although this segment is smaller than the

baby boomers’, it is an interesting target market since almost 85% of busters over the age of

15 have a job, but do not seem to be particularly inclined to save much. Furthermore, they

oft en get allowances from their parents, resulting in quite high spending per capita. Baby

busters seem to have diff erent characteristics from baby boomers at the same age. Firstly, they

hold diff erent values. Baby busters are more materialistic, ambitious and show a greater need

for individualism, for keeping their own identity within the society. Secondly, baby busters

have more marketing knowledge; they acknowledge the meaning of marketing and advertising.

Th irdly, baby busters as compared with baby boomers are said to be more cynical and more

critical of advertising. Th ey reject any attempt to lump them together in a target segment.

In this day and age of new gadgets, clean and simple modern design, some people, including young ones, want to

escape to the reliability of decent old products. ‘Old’ is in. The brochure of AS Adventure, a chain of outdoor stores,

is full of high-tech gear, but has the look and feel of an old photo album, with sepia colours and ruffled photos with

brown edges. J.K. Rowling’s book The Tales of Beedle the Bard has a dowdy cover, as if the book has been lying around

in a flea market for years. Also, the book that was published following the 40-year writing career of John Irving looks

like it was found in a basement where it had lain for decades: old-fashioned typography, wrinkled paper and a dusty

cover. Of course, these are digital technology products, but they illustrate that ‘retro’ and ‘vintage’ are in. Cookbooks

and restaurants increasingly focus on grandmothers’ menus and old vegetables like earth pear and horseradish. The

Belgian supermarket Delhaize sells ‘unprofessionally baked’ cakes that look as if they were made at home. Good old

Marseille soap is immensely popular. Estée Lauder’s new Tuberose Gardenia perfume is based on the favourite

flowers of grandma Lauder. Many children have never seen a conventional telephone, but that did not stop Fisher

Price from launching its classical toy phone again, as well as its traditional school clock, with indicators and without

batteries. ‘ Time’ is the new currency, and there is a new generation of ‘time bandits’.^19

BUSINESS INSIGHT

Long live time bandits!

In many rich countries, the 1980s and 1990s were a period of rapidly falling birth rates. In

Southern Europe and Japan, and less markedly in Northern and Eastern Europe, generation Y

(also known as millennials or echo boomers) is dramatically smaller than any of its predecessors.

In the Soviet Union during the 1980s, there was a ‘baby boom echo’ similar to that in the USA,

and generation Y there is relatively large. In the USA more than 70 million of them comprise

about a quarter of all Americans and the largest demographic cohort since the baby boomers.^20

In their book on Connecting to the Net.Generation , Junco and Mastrodicasa included research-

based information about the personality profi les of generation Y. In their survey, they found

that 97% of students owned a computer, 94% owned a mobile phone and 56% owned an MP3

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