CHANGING DEMOGRAPHICS

Marketers have always been concerned with changing demographics in order to profile customers and subgroups of customers. They are discovering how rapidly they need to rethink and reassess such groupings. We have to be concerned with:

· structural changes (in population, age distributions, fecundity/birth rates of different cultures),

· migrations - net of immigration and emigration (aculturalization, ethnicity, diversity, and the development of multicultural societies), and

· changes in beliefs and values held by different people (shifts, divergences, and convergence of cultural norms and values).

The total potential market is growing as the world population expands at an increasing rate although it should be noted that this growth is not uniform, and in some areas - including Europe - the population is actually declining.

The main growth continues to occur in the Far East, especially China and Korea, and in South America. Of course population growth does not imply a direct growth in market opportunity, especially because those countries with larger growth rates also tend to be those with lower GNP per capita. More importantly, population growth in these regions results проявляться

However, even more dramatic are the changes in the structure of the population due to birth rates and life expectancy.. These result because of differences in fecundity (fertility, health of mothers, and survival rates) and other changes in society (women in more developed societies restricting pregnancies and/or choosing to delay the onset of childbearing) combined with longer life expectancy. In some countries, such as Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India, life expectancy will double over the course of less than a century.

These changes have important consequences for marketers. In the west, age-generation profiling сбор характеристик has become even more a part of the marketers' toolkit - witnessed by the growth in targeted services and goods to WOOPs ("well off older people"), DINKYs ("double income, no kids yet") and SWLAs ("single women living alone") replacing the older A1, A2, B, and C social class groupings.

Whilst migration has very little effect on overall population levels, it does contribute to changes in population structure. Immigrants usually come from different cultural backgrounds and offer and create different opportunities for marketers. Entirely new markets have been identified and satisfied (like one for black adhesive plasters) for these immigrants as new customers. In addition immigrants often become a new source of suppliers as they offer new, culturally-led products and services to the host community - such as ethnic food shops and restaurants.

Smoking

As smoking declines in the west, tobacco companies have found an even larger and expanding group of new smokers in China. More cigarettes are smoked in China than anywhere else, with 1,643 billion consumed in 1998. Given that global consumption in 2000 was 5,500 billion, then one in every three cigarettes smoked is smoked in China.

"Tobacco companies are cranking out cigarettes at the rate of five and a half trillion a year," announced the World Health Organization, "nearly 1,000 cigarettes for every man, woman, and child on the planet."

Top five cigarette consumers:

1. China: 1,643 billion

2. US: 451 billion

3. Japan: 328 billion

4. Russia: 258 billion

5. Indonesia: 215 billion^[1]

^{[1]Source: US Federal Trade Commission Cigarette Report, 2003.}

Date: 2015-01-12; view: 879