Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The holiday season is once again upon us and this year marketers have an unprecedented opportunity to blow their sales out of the water. For the first time in history, consumers over 50 make up the majority — 51 percent — of all of consumer spending according to just-released data from the U.S. Consumer Expenditure Survey.

While marketers are preoccupied with Millennials — who became the biggest adult age demo this year — consumers over 50 control 70 percent of our country’s wealth, making them a significantly greater holiday sales opportunity than their kids.

One might expect that 50+ would account for the majority of health (63%) and insurance (68%) expenditures. However, when it comes to buying for everyone on their holiday lists, consider that people 50+ are now responsible for 51 percent of all entertainment spending as well as 57 percent of big ticket items such as new cars and trucks....

A new European study on human behaviour suggests that people can be divided into one of four main personality types — with 'Envious' being the most common.

The new research, carried out by a team of researchers from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and the universities of Barcelona, Rovira i Virgili and Zaragoza, Spain, presented 541 volunteers with hundreds of social dilemmas and asked them to report on what they would do in each situation.

Participants had to make decisions based on individual or group interests, which would lead to either collaboration or conflict with others.

The decisions also had different consequences depending on what another participant involved decided to do, with Anxo Sánchez, one of the authors of the study explaining, "Those involved are asked to participate in pairs, these pairs change, not only in each round, but also each time the game changes. So, the best option could be to cooperate or, on the other hand, to oppose or betray ..... In this way, we can obtain information about what people do in very different social situations."

The researchers then created a computer algorithm to analyze the responses and classify participants into personality groups based on their behaviour.

The results showed that the majority of the participants — 90 per cent — could be divided into just four basic personality types, Envious, Trusting, Optimistic, and Pessimistic.

Two years ago, for the first time, the Direct Marketing Association put a number—$156 billion—on what it called the data-driven marketing economy (DDME) in the United States. Yesterday it released a follow-up report showing that data isn't just driving, it's speeding. It clocked in at $202 billion in 2014, a two-year increase of 35%, and it employed nearly a million people—650,000 more than it did in 2012.“

All of marketing, we estimate, is about $1.3 trillion a year in the U.S., so that makes data-driven marketing a little under 20% of the total," said Harvard Business School professor John Deighton, who directed the study for DMA with Peter Johnson, principal of mLightenment Economic Impact Research....

Understand and apply Consumer Trend Canvas to any consumer trend. Today.

CONSUMER TREND CANVAS: An easy-to-follow framework that will help you not only unpack and understand any consumer trend, but also help you apply it to launch successful consumer-facing innovations of your own.

Consumer trends are, at their heart, an essential part of uncovering  innovation opportunities. Otherwise they’re just intellectual masturbation: diverting, pleasant and entertaining, but with little real purpose ;)

Yet we frequently hear that ‘trends’ feel mysterious and opaque. Which is where the CONSUMER TREND CANVAS* comes in....