[Resource of the Day] — The Changing Consumer

Today’s article: The Changing Face of the U.S. Consumer
by Peter Francese
Source: Advertising Age.com

The other day, I posted up an article about rethinking WHY consumers buy. Today, I want to offer an article that talks about who these consumers are.

One of my frustrations in dealing with many small publishers is that they create products without deciding whom they’re trying to develop them for. Often when I’ve talked to people trying to pitch comics and I ask them, “who’s your target audience for this?”, they have a vague idea at best about who they expect to pick up their book every month.

As I’ve said many times on this site, one of the most important aspects of developing a product is developing your marketing. And in order to do that, you’ll need to develop an STP plan (segmenting, targeting and positioning). And in order to do THAT, you’ll need to understand the base of consumers available.

But before you get started, you need to realize something rather important: that demographic of 16-24 that most US comic book creators want to attract? They’re actually a pretty small market right now compared to the rest of the US population. The two biggest consumer markets right now are ages 35-44 and 45-54; they account for 49% of consumer spending in the US. And over the next ten years, these groups are going to shrink as these consumers enter the 55+ demographic… and shift from a consumer mentality to a service mentality.

As I’ve said in my article on the history of comics, there was a time when around 1-2% of the population read comic books. Today, not only has the actual number of readers declined, but the number of comic book readers has dropped down to about .1% of the entire US population. As for the publishing industry in general, the number of adult readers has been dropping consistently for years. Though the retail book market experienced something of a boom over the last 15 years as retailers consolidated into larger stores and niche categories became more available, sales overall have been stagnant, and the publishing industry has been showing signs of maturity for some time.

Check out this snippet from the article:

Can these older consumers, whom many in marketing have ignored for so long, pick up the spending slack? Well, they’ve been doing pretty well lately. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports in its annual consumer-spending surveys that households headed by people 55 to 64 increased their total spending at almost twice the rate of all households (60% vs. 32%) in the most recent five-year survey period.

No other age group comes even close to that growth rate. One reason for the jump in spending was the 23% growth in older households. But the other reason was rising household income. The average household headed by someone 55 to 64 had $10,600 more to spend in 2007 than the average household in that age group five years earlier.

Lest we forget, the oldest boomers are starting to get their direct deposits from the Social Security Administration and, some pundits have suggested, will thus shortly bankrupt the nation. That’s nonsense, of course, but it’s a great story.

In the next five years, aging boomers will add more than 1 million consumers per year to the 65-and-older segment — increasing its number at more than twice the rate of the past five years. This boomer-driven growth will be highly concentrated in the 65-to-74 age group, where more than 80% of that near-term growth in the 65-plus segment will occur.

The article goes on to discuss some strategies on how these consumers can be served. The writer firmly believes that safety, security, and guarantees for services are the wave of the future, and I’m inclined to agree with that. The older people get, the more stuff they have, and the less they’re going to want more, especially in the realm of big-ticket items. Instead, they’re going to focus on services and experiences. That’s going to be very hard for publishers to take advantage of, particularly since many of these folks are going to be less likely to read as they get older and more likely to switch to radio and television (and perhaps some form of digital media) exclusively. This is already a trend with Baby Boomers, and it’s going to continue as more media options become available.

So, how can a publisher target this audience with any amount of success? Especially if that publisher, like me, wants to produce comics? There are options!

First of all, there’s always a service option, where publishers can band together and set up book clubs designed to appeal towards these folks. One model that would probably work very well would be to take works that are in the public domain, put them together in nice volumes, and sell “classic of the month” libraries to old folks who want to have nice sets of books to enhance their home image and to have available for their grandchildren to read. A similar model could be used to produce comics for these folks, which would make the grandchildren angle all the more viable. The drawback of such a system is that it’s easy for competitors to imitate, so the really successful company will be the one with the best service — the product needs to be high-quality, but the service needs to be superb.

There’s also the option of using comics, with large-print bubbles and simplistic art, as a form of method of delivering information. The comics medium is very powerful, and quite underutilized. Pioneers like Will Eisner recognized that comics could provide an excellent method for designing instruction manuals. Comic book companies could pick up contract work designing instruction manuals for high-end electronics and other items that older folks are likely to purchase, but also likely to find complex and difficult to use.

Similarly, comic book publishers could produce adaptations of popular informational books or novels that are geared at this segment. Admittedly, this is a strange idea that would require a lot of development, but if it can be done right, that company would have a huge first mover advantage with the segment.

And, as I alluded, developing products for children and focusing marketing on their grandparents could also be a viable method of making sales. This will work particularly well with books that are educational or that promote good character and values; often, grandparents do not approve of the way their children raise their grandchildren, and if they can be convinced that they can augment a child’s education with extra Christmas and birthday presents, there may be potential there for a secondary market.

Take a look at the article, and see what you think. I’d love for readers to post their own ideas about this issue on this thread!

Writing Scraps

by Sean J. Jordan