I found these on a flyer sent through to me from McCrindle Research and being a slightly staty nerd boy that I was at Uni and school, I found them quite interesting. Whether you do or not is another matter entirely. I’ll also throw in a comment or two about them.

Median Age for Parents (new births)

Fathers – 33.1

Mothers – 30.7

This is in contrast to the stats from 1979 where for men it was 29.3 and women just 26.5. There is a clear and dramatic shift for both sexes that has a lot of implications on product development and marketing. Realistically within 10 years we could see an average age for men of over 35, which dramatically expands the time that men have with substantial disposable income before they start seeing families sucking the cash out of them.

New Dads...everyone say 'ahhh'.

If you consider that people could start working at 21 (assuming they visit University) and don’t have children for 12 years, that’s a fair spend available to the marketplace.  Think electronic good, film, music, entertainment, alcohol, fashion. They’re all embracing a demographic that’s getting older and older, and will have more and more to spend. Is it fair to believe that if you catch them when they start their first job, you’ve got them for a long time?

Life Expectancy At Birth

Male – 79.0

Female – 83.7

My thoughts on this con are well known!

God. 79.0 is old. Fortunately I’m not half-way there yet. But look at the massive gap as a man between your first child and your impending doom – 46 years! That’s a damn long time. The likelihood of people becoming great-grand parents is massive. Urgh. Just thought about old people having sex. No wonder AMI are plugging their nasal delivery technology.

But seriously, the ‘grey $’ is something that I personally, don’t believe anyone markets to overly well. Think of a product, a TV commercial, a print campaign that would you say concentrates on cornering this marketing? These people still watch TV and read magazines, but no-one really wants their money. And Facebook is also growing huge numbers in this demographic too. Social networking for the retired? It’s gotta be better than bowls.

Generation X

% of workforce today – 44%

% of workforce 2020 – 37%

Generation Y

% of workforce today – 18%

% of workforce 2020 – 35%

Ha! My theories about the media and marketing over-dramatising the importance of Gen Y could be well founded (which is mainly just a gripe because I’m getting old) or I could be seeing conclusions to fit my own sense of frailty. So you could sell your products to them now and you’d be concentrating on just 18% of the market, and in 11 years time, they’ll still be in a minority in the workforce when compared to Gen X. What other implications does this have on what you do now? Well, it would suggest that perhaps looking at who you employ to work for you is also just as important, give then 85% of those Gen X working today, will still be working by 2020, and would give you a substantially bigger, and more experienced pool to pick from now.

McCrindle offer up some great other insights that could help (or hinder!) your business. For those wanting to look at the full set of stats, the full demographic map (and one for the USA too) is available here.