 Hi, welcome. My name is Dr. Marcy Stone and this is Unit 9, Cultural Influences of your Consumer Behavior Course. This course has 10 units and Unit 9 is on Cultural Influences. Here are the Unit 9 learning outcomes. So we have explained the critical role that demographics play in influencing consumer behavior. Compare the nature of generations and develop an understanding of the generations in the United States. Explain how our memberships in ethnic, racial, and religious subcultures often play a big role in guiding our consumption behaviors. Contrast the various ethnic and religious subcultures and the unique opportunities and challenges they present to marketers. Why are learning outcomes so important? So every learning outcome ties back to your course materials and your assessments and your test preparation. Here are the Unit 9 overview topics. So we have demographics that influence consumer behavior, the nature of generations in the U.S., ethnic, racial, and religious subcultures, ethnic and religious subcultures, and marketing. And here are the vocabulary terms that we're going to discuss in this presentation. All right. So there are numerous cultural influences and demographics that might influence a consumer's buying behavior. So these include family, race, sex, generations, age, or subcultures. From a marketing perspective, it's important to understand these differences and how to connect with a specific target market. For example, if you're trying to sell products, if the product that you're trying to sell is roofing product, then you would want to specifically target homeowners who may be between the ages of 40 and 70. Targeting these products to college-aged adults would not make sense because they should be targeted to homeowners or perhaps business owners who own buildings. By better understanding demographics and how they influence consumer behavior, you may be able to develop a more focused marketing plan. Okay. So this chart shows demographics by age. So it's people living in the United States as of 2015. It shows males on the left in blue and females on the right in red. And you can see we're pretty even when it comes to except for the 85 and above, which clearly shows more females than males. But for the most part, it's pretty even. And so when we look at these areas where you see it looks like 20 to 24, 25 to 29 is a very large generation. And then you also see from 50 to 54 and maybe 55 to 59 in there, also another large generation. So what we're seeing with the older generations is that these are typically your baby boomers, your Gen X generations. And we have to remember it was seven years ago or eight years ago when this chart was put together. But we're looking at your baby boomer generations. This is the generation that was the largest for the longest time. And now we have the millennials, which are just as large or almost even larger. But when we look at these, you have to consider your target market. So we use the roofing example for homeowners, you would want to specifically target these ages for those. And so it's really important to understand who you're representing and who you're trying to reach when you're looking at demographics by age. And it's an interesting chart. This is also presented if you ever go to the US population clock website. Very interesting to watch the numbers grow. But in the United States, we overall about every nine seconds, we gain another person and that includes deaths. That includes people being born and also immigrants coming to the United States. And so it's an interesting thing to watch. And then if you ever do go to that website, there's also a column there for world population. And that one's moving much, much faster than what we see in the United States. From a marketing perspective, it's important to understand consumers from the perspective of the various generations that are alive today. So although there are five or six generations alive, marketing may focus on the largest of those generations. So those might include the baby boomers, Gen X and the millennials. So most baby boomers are people in their 60s and 70s. And this generation is likely to have more disposable income than any other generation. So because many of them are retired, they may be more likely to take long vacations, buy an RV, buy a vacation home or even take up a new hobby. Then you have Gen X consumers and these people are typically in their 40s and 50s. They're a smaller generation than the baby boomers. And because this generation is smaller than the baby boomers, these workers are more likely to have greater opportunities in the workplace. So you've got one really large generation followed by a smaller generation followed by a larger generation. So as the Gen X people are taking over the jobs of the baby boomers as they retire, there are not as many people to fill all of those open jobs, which is one of the reasons that we see such a low unemployment rate right now. So this might include accepting jobs that their previous baby boomers, their baby boomer parents could not compete for. And most likely they're going to be making higher salaries as a result. So the millennial generation, they're typically in their 30s and 40s. And they equal the size of the baby boomer generation or they're actually a little bit larger than that generation. So that generation has been really quite vocal about the fact that quality of life is more important than having a full time, a well paying full time job, in which they may be required to work more than 50 hours a week. So as a result, that generation also has less disposable income than the two generations who came before them. From a marketing perspective, it's important to understand the generations, their overall views of life, and their expected social classes in order to better understand their consumer buying behavior. Okay, so here are the five generations that we have that are working side by side. And you have to consider that some of these on the far right here, some of these are still in high school, you have to consider that. And then you might have the ones that are on the far left, they may not be working or they may be working part time somewhere or even volunteering their time. So you have the traditionalist, I think this is called the great generation. You also have the boomers that are in there and you can see the age ranges of when they were born. So from 1946 to 1964, most of them were born after the war, after World War II people came back, started having babies. Then we have your Gen X generation, and you can see they grew up with the internet or they grew up with MTV. The internet came later, they didn't have mobile phones as children, but did later in life, maybe in their 20s. And then you have the millennial generation, those are born between 1977 and 1997. And these dates, they're subjective, like depending on the source, they may be a few years earlier, a few years later, somewhere in there. But then you can see they were alive during the 9-11 attacks. This is a world too that really actually Gen Z, or they say Gen 2020, they actually never have known a world without a cell phone, which is amazing to think of. And when they see phone booths, they're like, what is that? And it's interesting to see the differences between them, but getting back to the millennials, they're really social, they're really active on Google. Maybe, yeah, Google, Facebook, TikTok, that kind of thing. And then you have the Gen Z, these are more, they've grown up with tablets, they've grown up with apps. They've never known a world without cell phones and tablets. And so it's interesting from a marketing perspective when you're looking at the views of these people. I think it's also interesting from a work perspective, you've got the boomers there, very hardworking. They really grew up in a world where their employer took care of them. They grew up in a world where you stayed at your job for decades, if not the same job that when you retired. And then Gen Z came along and we didn't have, at that point, they didn't have a, what do you call it, like a, oh, I am losing the word. They didn't have that same loyalty to their employer. That's really what I'm trying to say because there was no longer pensions, like they were gone at that point. And so you start to see over those next few generations, there's less loyalty to employers and people that are more concerned with their lifestyle and not working as much as the boomers did. So anyway, interesting, an interesting thing to consider, especially from a marketing perspective. Okay, so most consumers belong to ethnic, racial and religious subcultures, which may also include influencing their purchasing decisions. So by better understanding these memberships or subcultures, a marketer may be able to easily target a specific market to promote a product or brand. It's also important to take into consideration gender and culture when it comes to consumer buying behavior. So there's certain products or services that people from a specific culture may or may not buy. And it's important to understand this when you're developing your strategic marketing plan. It's also important to consider sensitivity issues when you're promoting products to a specific subculture. For example, if one religion is really vocal about members not drinking alcohol, then it really wouldn't make sense to promote or show the use of alcohol in any advertising when you're trying to focus on the population. A subculture is a section of culture, a smaller section of a cultural society. So we talked about this a little bit already about the LDS church and having their religion, but then they also have some members that are Jewish. And it's actually quite a big subculture within their overall culture of religion. So when you're promoting advertising or marketing to a subculture, it's important to understand that there are opportunities and challenges that will need to be understood before you develop a strategic marketing plan. By better understanding the subculture, that a specific market can be targeted then for any products or services. The one example might include specific clothing that certain religions require, clothing that may be promoted or sold by the religion and not outside companies. Unit 9 Learning Outcomes. In this presentation, we talked a little bit about demographics and how they influence consumer behavior. We talked about the generations and how important it is to understand the different generations and their values. We looked at how our memberships in ethnic, racial and religious subcultures often play a big role in guiding consumption behaviors. And then also the ethnic and religious subcultures and the unique opportunities and challenges that they present to marketers. Alright, what's next? So Unit 10 is on informing marketing strategy. My name is Dr. Marcy Stone and I just wanted to say thanks for listening.