Aventine Partners

Adults on Facebook

A recent study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project documented the rapidly increasing participation rates of older adults in social media such as Facebook and MySpace, as well as a range of other online activities.

Much of the information from the study is captured very nicely in the chart of online activity be age group:

(Pew Internet and American Life Project, Generations Online in 2009, Sydney Jones and Susannah Fox, January 28, 2009)

As a quick aside from the significance of the data presented here, this chart does a very nice job of communicating the degrees of penetration that various forms of online activity have made among the generations, from Gen Y to the G.I. Generation.

The Shifting Consumer

Identifying how consumer attitudes are shifting in this downturn and which shifts will stick is an important, but tricky, task.  John A. Quelch and Katherine E. Jocz tackled this issue in the Financial Times with their Managing in a Downturn.  

I can recommend this article as thought provoking, and it contains some good insights.  But there's some bad mixed in with the good.  First the good.

Key takeaways:

"What is certain is that the market segmentation scheme you were using to plan your marketing budget and programmes this time last year is obsolete. You need to listen to your customers and possibly develop a new segmentation approach."  

Very true.  The authors recommend an overlay segmentation that adds insights to how consumers are reacting to the current environment.  This is likely a good first step.  

Youth, Americans, and Science

As we continue to work on Culture Graphics, we occasionally run across interesting findings in the data.

One of the topics evaluated in the most recent World Values Survey is the attitude of people towards science and technology.  According to theories about value in post-materialist societies (the book to read is Modernization and Postmodernization by Prof. Ronald Inglehart of the University of Michigan), people value science less the more they are separated from conditions of economic scarcity.  More specifically, generations that do not experience material want during their formative years tend to be more skeptical of the benefits of science and technology.

This phenomenon is illustrated tellingly in the chart above.  The survey asked the question, "In the long run, do you think the scientific advances we are making will help or harm mankind?"  The chart shows the percentage of respondents who believe science will harm mankind, broken down by age group.