August 16, 2024 • 13 mins
George Noory and marketing expert Ken Gronbach discuss the global implications of the world's shifting demographics.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from coast to coast am on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Ken, how did you get involved in this?
Speaker 3 (00:08):
I was in the marketing business for about twenty years,
had an advertising agency and in Connecticut, and we lost
one of our major clients. We couldn't figure out why.
We had American Honda Motorcycle as a client. And we
had one hundred and forty dealers and the Northeast from
(00:31):
Maine to Pittsburgh to Washington, d C. And we were
selling motorcycles like crazy in the late eighties. Bikes came
in in the late eighties and put them in the dealerships,
spent millions of dollars on radio, TV, newspaper billboards. And
I get a call from American Honda in California and
they said, Ken, did you run the ads and keep man?
(00:52):
I'm not liking that question. I said, what's up? And
they said, we don't have any traffic. There's no traffic
in the dealerships. And they said, but Kawasaki, Suzuki and Yamaha,
the big competition, has the exact same problem, and Harley
is selling them like crazy. Soud Honda was just scratching
your head. So from nineteen eighty six to nineteen ninety two.
(01:16):
We tried everything, and eventually all of our dealers closed.
Can you imagine they just closed? So we said, well,
that's that the rest of the story. Nineteen ninety six
Clinton versus Dole October of the year and reading a
newspaper here in Connecticut, I was talking about why a
(01:42):
particular part of our population, a Generation X that's born
nineteen sixty five to eighty four, is not voting. And
so we did some homework and discovered that Generation X
is small. There's actually nine million fewer people in Generation X,
(02:05):
and from peak to valley it's it's the peak of
the boomers to the trough of Generation X is about
a thirty five percent free fall. So wherever Generation X goes,
they wipe out markets. So that's what got me started.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
And then what turns it around? How does a company
decide what to do for the future.
Speaker 3 (02:25):
The companies absolutely positively have to know who their end
user market is, not who they're selling to, because they
might be selling to a conglomerate someplace, or to buyers
that are unrepresentative of the end users. You have to
know end users, and if your end user market's getting big,
(02:48):
you have opportunity. If it's getting small, it's time to bail.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Let me use Amazon dot Com as an example. When
Jeff Bezols started his company with his life at the time,
he was selling books out of his garage. I mean
that was his intent. I ran into him a couple
months ago, by the way, real genius guy. But he
did not anticipate at that time that he'd be the
(03:15):
world's largest retailer selling online. Yeah, he kind of like
stumbled into it. He just because I remember guests in
the beginning of Amazon. I'd say, so, where do we
get your book? You know, you're thinking bookstores and stuff,
and they'd be saying Amazon dot com. Amazon dot com.
But who would ever think that it would explode into
(03:38):
the retail establishment. It is to the point where that company,
Amazon dot Com has hurt bricks and mortars retail stores
all around the country.
Speaker 3 (03:49):
Sure, and they can anticipate even doing more. There are
a couple of monster markets in the United States. One
of them is baby boomers, and baby boomers right now
are sixty to seventy nine years old. And then there's
generation of why millennials that were born nineteen seventy five
(04:11):
to nineteen eighty four. Is that right? No, that's not anyway.
Generation Why millennials are about eighty eight million. So whatever
those two, the baby boomers or the millennials do, it's
going to reshape the whole world of commerce in the
(04:33):
United States.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
Does age determine what products people buy?
Speaker 3 (04:40):
Are you kidding? Yes, very very much. And I don't
mean to be rude, but I once helped the gene
store that were selling Levis to general public. We took
(05:01):
them from ten million dollars to four hundred million. Well yeah,
and the reason was that we could never satisfy the
demands of the market, so we just kept on expanding, expanding,
and it was the baby boomers. And eventually, once the
baby boomers outgrew their ability to fit Injens, it was over.
(05:24):
And then the Gene business it nearly wiped out Levi's. So, yes,
age age is everything, age is power. Age. You need
to know how big your end user market is and
are they getting bigger or are they getting smaller?
Speaker 2 (05:44):
Because that's everything you told. Also, a great story the
last time you were on the program Ken about Harley
Davidson and how they missed the mark.
Speaker 3 (05:54):
And that's sad because I you know, nice American company. Yeah,
former President Bush even tried to Former President Trump tried
to save them and he but there wasn't anything he
could do about it. The fact is, you know, their
biggest bike weighs about a thousand pounds and that's a
lot of that's a lot of machinery between.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
Your leg that's a lot of weight for people, especially
younger people to hold up.
Speaker 3 (06:20):
Well, that's the whole idea, is that the baby boomers
who created the whole motorcycle market and then graduated into
hardly datasen because it was it was an older, more
gentrified bike. They can't ride them anymore, so it's over.
So you have literally you have Harley Davis and dealerships
(06:42):
across the United States were hardly beat on these folks
that were selling their bikes and made them build these
mausoleums of a dealership and they can't sustain them anymore.
So it's hardly his history, don't.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
You think of marketing executve I would ask the first
question to his staff, who's our end user? Folks? I
want to hear from everybody, tell me who our end
user is? To see if these people know who, then
the scope of the company's products are the buyers.
Speaker 3 (07:16):
Wouldn't you think you know, I'll tell you nineteen sixty
five to nineteen eighty four, that's when the Generation X
was born. When I discovered back in the late nineties
that this was a generation, A twenty year generation A
census generation was nine million people fewer than the Baby boomers.
(07:42):
And I said, you know, I wanted to know what
the percentage was. How much smaller are they? And the
number is about eleven or twelve percent smaller. An eleven
or twelve percent drop in your market erases you. And
if you don't and if you didn't see it coming,
that's your fault.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
I mean, it's not rocket science, is it.
Speaker 3 (08:05):
No? You know, George and I that's It's one of
the things that I deal with all the time, and
that is folks, don't you understand you think that that
it's a good idea right now just to stop having babies?
Is that a good idea? You know? After all we
(08:25):
can you know, we want to improve our environment and
we were concerned about global warming. Let's just reduce the
number of people without thinking about the ramifications of that
type of a decision when you've literally wiped out future
everybody because we all started out as babies.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
Well, and the problem with that, Kenny, is you got
one person will say, well, you know, I don't need
a kid, but you got twenty million people saying the
same thing.
Speaker 3 (08:55):
You got seventy five percent of the countries in the
world right now present. The only countries that are not
have not fallen off on fertility is subsat Era Africa.
On this, I believe like thirty five countries there. But
I don't know what's going to happen in s Africa.
But I do know what's going to happen in the
(09:17):
rest of the world, and that is if we don't
embrace this fertility issue, we're cooking ourselves. We're going to
have real problems in twenty thirty years.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
You say, by twenty one hundred, China will lose half
of its population, right.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
What China has done? Yeah, and this is this is
what I fay. Okay, George, Well, why can't China have
more kids now? If they're gonna if their population for
the first time in their history, is actually shrinking, and
it has last year and this year, why can't they
just have more kids? Well, for the last forty years,
(09:56):
they've been eliminating parents. And the last thing I knew
was if you wanted to have kids and needed.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
To have parents, that's right. So they ran out of
those the available source of kids thing go.
Speaker 3 (10:13):
Yeah and so, and you can't fix it. And uh,
I've had folks saying, I mean, well maybe if they
just had babies. Now, No, you can't do that because
it would just make your population even more lopsided. You
cannot do that. What you have to do is either
do immigration or fold the tent. And China and the
(10:37):
Asian countries are xenophobic. They don't do immigrants, so they're
going to fold the tent.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
When you speak for groups about marketing and demographics, what
type of questions do they ask you.
Speaker 3 (10:55):
Well, ironically, it's very very similar to what we're doing
right now. Is people always want to know politically what's
going to happen. So that's you know, I share that,
and I try to share that in an unbiased way,
you know, from a distance and just using numbers. But
they also want to know what their future is. And
very few of them, it really don't even have a clue.
(11:17):
Don't even have a clue that the amount of people
in their market is going to create their destiny in
four or five years and they and they miss it.
So yes, they want to know about that. But I
also talk about things like, you know, what's going to
happen with different cultures, what's going to happen with the
(11:38):
populations of the world. Where is it now? Where will
it be? You know? I guess in the in just
a few years, one in five people in the world
are going to live in Sub Sahara Africa based on
their high rate of fertility. One in five.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Pretty big number.
Speaker 3 (12:02):
Well, it's huge. Yeah when you think that, Yeah, it
could be easily a couple of billion people right now.
The South Ara Africa, I guess is bouncing off a
billion people. I mean, it's pretty close, but it's a
lot of countries.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
When you made the prediction that you thought Donald Trump
would not get elected, is that changeable or is that
based on right now or.
Speaker 3 (12:29):
What is that? You know? I don't know. You're taking
me into a territory that I know a little bit about.
I really believe that we're looking at a forty million
plus advantage for liberals over twenty twenty. It's substantial, that's huge. Yeah,
(12:56):
of course it is and if if for some reason,
you know, Trump loses the kids, who if the conservative
lose the kids, that's it. You can't. We're baby boomers
(13:16):
are dying about by the third of us are already dead.
Where the big lump at the aging part of our population,
and the big lump in young people is currently twenty
to forty. They're incredibly powerful. More and more people that
you know in gen Z that are younger than them
are coming of age to vote, about one every eight
(13:39):
or nine seconds. It's the world's going to be a
different place. We will be liberal.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one a m. Eastern and go to Coast to coastam
dot com for more
Now here's a highlight from coast to coast am on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Ken, how did you get involved in this?
Speaker 3 (00:08):
I was in the marketing business for about twenty years,
had an advertising agency and in Connecticut, and we lost
one of our major clients. We couldn't figure out why.
We had American Honda Motorcycle as a client. And we
had one hundred and forty dealers and the Northeast from
(00:31):
Maine to Pittsburgh to Washington, d C. And we were
selling motorcycles like crazy in the late eighties. Bikes came
in in the late eighties and put them in the dealerships,
spent millions of dollars on radio, TV, newspaper billboards. And
I get a call from American Honda in California and
they said, Ken, did you run the ads and keep man?
(00:52):
I'm not liking that question. I said, what's up? And
they said, we don't have any traffic. There's no traffic
in the dealerships. And they said, but Kawasaki, Suzuki and Yamaha,
the big competition, has the exact same problem, and Harley
is selling them like crazy. Soud Honda was just scratching
your head. So from nineteen eighty six to nineteen ninety two.
(01:16):
We tried everything, and eventually all of our dealers closed.
Can you imagine they just closed? So we said, well,
that's that the rest of the story. Nineteen ninety six
Clinton versus Dole October of the year and reading a
newspaper here in Connecticut, I was talking about why a
(01:42):
particular part of our population, a Generation X that's born
nineteen sixty five to eighty four, is not voting. And
so we did some homework and discovered that Generation X
is small. There's actually nine million fewer people in Generation X,
(02:05):
and from peak to valley it's it's the peak of
the boomers to the trough of Generation X is about
a thirty five percent free fall. So wherever Generation X goes,
they wipe out markets. So that's what got me started.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
And then what turns it around? How does a company
decide what to do for the future.
Speaker 3 (02:25):
The companies absolutely positively have to know who their end
user market is, not who they're selling to, because they
might be selling to a conglomerate someplace, or to buyers
that are unrepresentative of the end users. You have to
know end users, and if your end user market's getting big,
(02:48):
you have opportunity. If it's getting small, it's time to bail.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Let me use Amazon dot Com as an example. When
Jeff Bezols started his company with his life at the time,
he was selling books out of his garage. I mean
that was his intent. I ran into him a couple
months ago, by the way, real genius guy. But he
did not anticipate at that time that he'd be the
(03:15):
world's largest retailer selling online. Yeah, he kind of like
stumbled into it. He just because I remember guests in
the beginning of Amazon. I'd say, so, where do we
get your book? You know, you're thinking bookstores and stuff,
and they'd be saying Amazon dot com. Amazon dot com.
But who would ever think that it would explode into
(03:38):
the retail establishment. It is to the point where that company,
Amazon dot Com has hurt bricks and mortars retail stores
all around the country.
Speaker 3 (03:49):
Sure, and they can anticipate even doing more. There are
a couple of monster markets in the United States. One
of them is baby boomers, and baby boomers right now
are sixty to seventy nine years old. And then there's
generation of why millennials that were born nineteen seventy five
(04:11):
to nineteen eighty four. Is that right? No, that's not anyway.
Generation Why millennials are about eighty eight million. So whatever
those two, the baby boomers or the millennials do, it's
going to reshape the whole world of commerce in the
(04:33):
United States.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
Does age determine what products people buy?
Speaker 3 (04:40):
Are you kidding? Yes, very very much. And I don't
mean to be rude, but I once helped the gene
store that were selling Levis to general public. We took
(05:01):
them from ten million dollars to four hundred million. Well yeah,
and the reason was that we could never satisfy the
demands of the market, so we just kept on expanding, expanding,
and it was the baby boomers. And eventually, once the
baby boomers outgrew their ability to fit Injens, it was over.
(05:24):
And then the Gene business it nearly wiped out Levi's. So, yes,
age age is everything, age is power. Age. You need
to know how big your end user market is and
are they getting bigger or are they getting smaller?
Speaker 2 (05:44):
Because that's everything you told. Also, a great story the
last time you were on the program Ken about Harley
Davidson and how they missed the mark.
Speaker 3 (05:54):
And that's sad because I you know, nice American company. Yeah,
former President Bush even tried to Former President Trump tried
to save them and he but there wasn't anything he
could do about it. The fact is, you know, their
biggest bike weighs about a thousand pounds and that's a
lot of that's a lot of machinery between.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
Your leg that's a lot of weight for people, especially
younger people to hold up.
Speaker 3 (06:20):
Well, that's the whole idea, is that the baby boomers
who created the whole motorcycle market and then graduated into
hardly datasen because it was it was an older, more
gentrified bike. They can't ride them anymore, so it's over.
So you have literally you have Harley Davis and dealerships
(06:42):
across the United States were hardly beat on these folks
that were selling their bikes and made them build these
mausoleums of a dealership and they can't sustain them anymore.
So it's hardly his history, don't.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
You think of marketing executve I would ask the first
question to his staff, who's our end user? Folks? I
want to hear from everybody, tell me who our end
user is? To see if these people know who, then
the scope of the company's products are the buyers.
Speaker 3 (07:16):
Wouldn't you think you know, I'll tell you nineteen sixty
five to nineteen eighty four, that's when the Generation X
was born. When I discovered back in the late nineties
that this was a generation, A twenty year generation A
census generation was nine million people fewer than the Baby boomers.
(07:42):
And I said, you know, I wanted to know what
the percentage was. How much smaller are they? And the
number is about eleven or twelve percent smaller. An eleven
or twelve percent drop in your market erases you. And
if you don't and if you didn't see it coming,
that's your fault.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
I mean, it's not rocket science, is it.
Speaker 3 (08:05):
No? You know, George and I that's It's one of
the things that I deal with all the time, and
that is folks, don't you understand you think that that
it's a good idea right now just to stop having babies?
Is that a good idea? You know? After all we
(08:25):
can you know, we want to improve our environment and
we were concerned about global warming. Let's just reduce the
number of people without thinking about the ramifications of that
type of a decision when you've literally wiped out future
everybody because we all started out as babies.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
Well, and the problem with that, Kenny, is you got
one person will say, well, you know, I don't need
a kid, but you got twenty million people saying the
same thing.
Speaker 3 (08:55):
You got seventy five percent of the countries in the
world right now present. The only countries that are not
have not fallen off on fertility is subsat Era Africa.
On this, I believe like thirty five countries there. But
I don't know what's going to happen in s Africa.
But I do know what's going to happen in the
(09:17):
rest of the world, and that is if we don't
embrace this fertility issue, we're cooking ourselves. We're going to
have real problems in twenty thirty years.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
You say, by twenty one hundred, China will lose half
of its population, right.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
What China has done? Yeah, and this is this is
what I fay. Okay, George, Well, why can't China have
more kids now? If they're gonna if their population for
the first time in their history, is actually shrinking, and
it has last year and this year, why can't they
just have more kids? Well, for the last forty years,
(09:56):
they've been eliminating parents. And the last thing I knew
was if you wanted to have kids and needed.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
To have parents, that's right. So they ran out of
those the available source of kids thing go.
Speaker 3 (10:13):
Yeah and so, and you can't fix it. And uh,
I've had folks saying, I mean, well maybe if they
just had babies. Now, No, you can't do that because
it would just make your population even more lopsided. You
cannot do that. What you have to do is either
do immigration or fold the tent. And China and the
(10:37):
Asian countries are xenophobic. They don't do immigrants, so they're
going to fold the tent.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
When you speak for groups about marketing and demographics, what
type of questions do they ask you.
Speaker 3 (10:55):
Well, ironically, it's very very similar to what we're doing
right now. Is people always want to know politically what's
going to happen. So that's you know, I share that,
and I try to share that in an unbiased way,
you know, from a distance and just using numbers. But
they also want to know what their future is. And
very few of them, it really don't even have a clue.
(11:17):
Don't even have a clue that the amount of people
in their market is going to create their destiny in
four or five years and they and they miss it.
So yes, they want to know about that. But I
also talk about things like, you know, what's going to
happen with different cultures, what's going to happen with the
(11:38):
populations of the world. Where is it now? Where will
it be? You know? I guess in the in just
a few years, one in five people in the world
are going to live in Sub Sahara Africa based on
their high rate of fertility. One in five.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Pretty big number.
Speaker 3 (12:02):
Well, it's huge. Yeah when you think that, Yeah, it
could be easily a couple of billion people right now.
The South Ara Africa, I guess is bouncing off a
billion people. I mean, it's pretty close, but it's a
lot of countries.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
When you made the prediction that you thought Donald Trump
would not get elected, is that changeable or is that
based on right now or.
Speaker 3 (12:29):
What is that? You know? I don't know. You're taking
me into a territory that I know a little bit about.
I really believe that we're looking at a forty million
plus advantage for liberals over twenty twenty. It's substantial, that's huge. Yeah,
(12:56):
of course it is and if if for some reason,
you know, Trump loses the kids, who if the conservative
lose the kids, that's it. You can't. We're baby boomers
(13:16):
are dying about by the third of us are already dead.
Where the big lump at the aging part of our population,
and the big lump in young people is currently twenty
to forty. They're incredibly powerful. More and more people that
you know in gen Z that are younger than them
are coming of age to vote, about one every eight
(13:39):
or nine seconds. It's the world's going to be a
different place. We will be liberal.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one a m. Eastern and go to Coast to coastam
dot com for more
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George Noory
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