Market Segmentation: Age and Cohorts

Different media tend to use different categorizations of age-ranges. For instance, in the UK, the Broadcasters' Audience Research Board (BARB) usually refers to these age-groups:

Segmentation by age refers not only to age-groups as such but also to cohorts (groups growing up together during a specific time-period). The most familiar (US-based) distinctions are as follows:

As a quick search of the Web will reveal, these terms are widely employed in both advertising and journalism - where generalizations are often made about their key characteristics. What sort of generalizations can you find on the Web about each of these groups?

Here, for instance, is how one Web source describes baby-boomers:

Are similar generalizations recognizable outside of American culture? Note that often these labels seem to be simply a means for one generation to criticize another, but insofar as they are recognized they can serve as a basis for market segmentation.

Related to this are the jokey quizzes which circulate on the Internet about whether you are a child of the 80s (or whenever) - based on cultural phenomena which are familiar only to those whose adolescent years were spent in the relevant decade (e.g. music, ads, films, TV programmes). Knowing which of these to allude to in ads is one key to market segmentation in relation to age cohorts. If you wanted to distinguish between those whose adolescence was spent in the 1970s, 1980s or 1990s which might be the most distinctive (global) cultural phenomena of each decade which you could build an ad upon? Could you devise an online quiz which would reliably distinguish between each group without asking their age or date-of-birth?

Young Audiences for Advertisers: Psychographic Clusters

[Selby 1995, p. 25]

Suggested Reading

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