There are three major age groups in the United States:
Youth and Young adults
- Children and teenagers represent an important demographic to marketers because they influence their parents’ buying decisions, have their own purchasing power, and will mature into adult consumers.
- Persistence nagging- a plea that is repeated over and over again
- Importance nagging- appeals to parents’ desire to provide the best for their children
- The youth market has often been identified as Generation Y, a term used to describe people born after 1980.
Baby Boomers
- This age group, born between 1946 and 1964, represents the tidal wave of Americans born after World War II, when thousands of GIs returned home and started raising families.
- They comprise a market of 76 million people, or about 28 percent of the U.S population. 60 million are over the age of 55.
- Baby boomers have grown up in an age of prosperity and continue to have few qualms about spending on consumer goods instead of saving for retirement.
- Boomers are now maturing and starting to share many of the same concerns as the seniors. They are naturally concerned about health care, insurance, retirement planning, personal investing, and other issues.
Seniors
- This group frequently is defined as men and women 65 years or older, although some include everyone over the age of 50.
- Medical advances have improved life expectancy to the point that today almost 36.3 million Americans are age 65 or older (12% of the population). A heavy upsurge in the senior population will peak at 50 million (21%) by 2010.
- With the perspective of long experience, they often are less easily convinced than young adults, demand value in the things that they buy, and pay little attention to fads.
- They form an excellent source of volunteers for social, health, and cultural organizations because they have time and often are looking for something to do.
Americans spend an average of 4.5 hours a day watching television, more time than they spend on any other medium.
All together, the Census Bureau has calculated that Americans in 2007 spent an average of 3,518 hours using the media, which is an increase of about 200 hours from the 2000 data.
- 1,555 hours watching television (broadcast and cable)
- 974 hours listening to the radio
- 195 hours using the Internet
- 175 hours reading a newspaper
- 122 hours reading magazines
- 106 hours reading books
- 86 hours playing video games
Notes are taken from Public Relations: Strategies and Tactics by Dennis L. Wilcox and Glen T. Cameron.
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