Lina Ko March 30th, 2009
The environmentally-friendly shower has replaced bath tubs as the first choice of homeowners and hoteliers alike.
According to The Toronto Star, when Hyatt Regency took over the former Holiday Inn on King Street West in the theatre district, it got rid of most of the tubs in a massive remodelling effort. The hotel reopened in February 2009.
People don’t seem to want to spend so much time to have a bath. They want to be quick, in and out. In terms of the environmental impact, showers take up to one-third of the water of a bath. Technology has also improved over the years so people can get ‘full body massages’ from nozzles located in ceilings and walls.
Canada’s ageing boomers are also moving toward large showers when renovating their bathrooms. Safety issues are the main reason – seniors might slip and fall climbing into or out of a tub and boomers are planning for their next lifestage.
Lina Ko March 23rd, 2009
According to Associated Press, more babies were born in the U.S. in 2007 than any year in the nation’s history, topping the peak during the baby boom 50 years earlier. This bodes both good and bad news:
- The U.S. population is more than replacing itself, a healthy trend not happening in the rest of the world!
- However, the bad news is that the teen birth rate was up for the second year in a row.
The birth rate rose slightly for women of all ages, and births to unwed mothers reached an all-time high of about 40 percent, continuing a trend begun years ago. More than three-quarters of these women were 20 or older.
The new numbers suggest the second year of a baby boomlet, with U.S. fertility rates higher in every racial group – the highest among Hispanic women. On average, an American woman has 2.1 babies in her lifetime – the ‘magic number’ required for a population to replace itself.
Countries with much lower rates – such as Japan and Italy – face future labour shortages and eroding tax bases as they fail to reproduce enough to take care of their ageing elders. Canada is no better. The latest numbers from 2006 indicated 360,000 new births when compared to 4.3 million births in the U.S. in 2007. Birth rates have been slowly rising in Canada in the last five years, but we’re a long way off the 1990s’ peak. Birth rates might be declining because of the economic recession as well.
Lina Ko March 16th, 2009
According to The Regina Leader-Post, ageing baby boomers will reshape the tourism industry – from fuelling a demand for educational travel to turning-up their noses at the early-bird buffets popular with their parents.
Canadians travelling within their own borders account for 77 percent of tourism revenues in Canada, according to the Canadian Tourism Commission, and they’re ageing rapidly. One in seven Canadians is over age 65, the latest census figures show, and driven by the boomers and falling birth rates, the fastest-growing segment of the population is 55- to 64-year-olds.
The Ontario Ministry of Tourism predicts that by 2026, population ageing will lessen demand for strenuous activities like skiing and canoeing. On the other hand, ‘low energy activities’ like museum visits, live theatre, wine or culinary experiences and historical sites are expected to get a boost. Organizations such as the Art Gallery of Ontario, Royal Ontario Museum, The Stratford Shakespeare Festival of Canada, and the Shaw Festival should all be doing well in the next decade.
By the time baby boomers reach their senior years, many of them will have had their fill of packaged vacations and typical destinations. Instead, there’s a big appetite for more specialized educational and experiential travel, including hobby vacations, cargo ship cruises, ‘voluntourism’ and literary-themed travel.
Travel is much more important to boomers than the average traveller. In tough economic times, when people are thinking, “Should I do a home renovation or should I go on a trip?” the trip’s likely to win out.
Lina Ko March 9th, 2009
According to a recent survey by Yahoo! Canada, Canada’s baby boomers are increasingly finding that the Internet is where they find ‘emotional’ connections. As mentioned before on this blog, almost half of boomers are on social networking sites (50 percent of women and 45 pecent of men) and close to one-third (31 percent) say their first photographic glimpse of a new grandchild or family member came via their computer screens. Sixty-four percent of boomers say they e-mail friends and family more often than they call them on the phone., while nearly 72 percent say they are more connected to their loved ones because of the Internet.
The survey also showed 55 percent of boomers feel the world would be ‘passing them by’ if they weren’t online, and more than one-third of unmarried people in that age group use the Internet to search for personal ads and online romance.
The Edmonton Journal also pointed out that the financial crisis has spurred more boomers to look for minute-by-minute news online though they are still more ‘mixed’ in their consumption of online and traditional media than their younger counterparts. Kids bring their parents and grandparents to this technology, and now boomers and seniors are very much part of the online community.
Lina Ko March 3rd, 2009
I’ve mentioned on this blog before that contrary to popular belief, baby boomers do participate in Internet activities and they are more tech-savvy than perceived. According to a recent report by Forrester Research, social media are hitting the radar for the majority of boomers who surf the net, from blogs to social networks and online videos. The report indicated that:
- Two-thirds of trailing-edge baby boomers (aged 43 to 52) and 62 percent of older boomers (53 to 63) consumer social media including reading blogs, listening to podcasts, watching user-generating videos, reading forums or reading customer ratings
- This is up from 2007, when 47 percent of younger boomers and 39 percent of older ones made use of social media
- Boomers are likely to be critics rather than content creators, with the proportion of online boomers reacting to content more than doubling to 34 percent in 2008, up from 15 percent in 2007
- Almost 25 percent of younger boomers are active in social communities, up from 15 percent in 2007
Once again, this speaks to segmented marketing for marketers who are interested in reaching this demographic via social media. While you wouldn’t target boomers the same way you do with college students in social marketing, it makes sense to spend part of your boomer-focused budget in social environments that will become more active and productive over time.