audience Archives - Fitzpatrick Wholesale Blog

The millennials have been the target of a barrage of advertising over the last two decades in the hopes of tiding over the materialistic new kids on the block. However, now that the millennials are aging gracefully into the ripe old demographic of 20-37 year olds, it’s about time for marketers to start shifting their attention to our new and shiny batch of impressionable youths: Generation Z. While only having been born in 1995 or later, these up-and-comers have already established new ideologies and media consumption patterns totally different to their predecessors.

Marketo have compiled a very useful infographic breaking down the characteristics of this new Gen Z which will prove to be vital for any retailer looking to appeal to this new audience. Know your enemy and all that, right? However bear in mid that all of the figures cited in the graph pertain to American Gen Z kids, but it’s still a fairly good stab at what Irish kids are doing nowadays too.

It can be difficult enough finding a target audience to target with your assortment of amazing goods and products, which is why it’s important to not automatically write off any particular group of potential customers. In their study ‘Grey is the New Black‘ conducted on the behalf of Retail Excellence, Behaviour & Attitudes found that many retailers dismiss older people as a potential demographic because they are all notoriously stuffy and penny-pinching and upsetting to look at obviously. However if we let go of these misconceptions, it becomes clear that this significant portion of the population (nearly 23%) is continuously undervalued as a possible market. For example, over 82% of the age 65+ demographic agreed that they had no large financial commitments as opposed to only 23% of the age 25-49 group. While this study was conducted in 2011, many of the observations still ring true today, maybe even moreso now than back then; the study remarks that while older people are not associated with being tech-savvy, many in this group have come to embrace such technologies as Sky+ Television and Skype. This study is an excellent read if you are looking to expand your market into this underappreciated demographic as it not only includes statistics and figures but also market research into this group to see what older people appreciate in their customer care.