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