There is a sloppy edifice in global marketing. It’s the “18 to 34 or 18-49 demographic”, depending on which dinosaur museum you’re visiting. It’s 100% wrong, and getting worse. People have been howling about this anachronism for years, since at least 2012 to my knowledge.
The broad theory is that an absurdly nominal age group of non-existent people somehow have the same discretionary buying patterns. This unquestioned load of garbage has a lot to answer for, not least of which is the bottomless IQ levels of those using these demographics. Maybe these demographics applied at some time in history, but when?
How can someone born in 2003 have the same buying patterns, real or imaginary, as someone born in 1971 or 1986? What godforsaken idiocy is this? How can someone aged 49 with a mortgage, a divorce or so, and any number of possible income streams be an identical twin to someone aged 18?
How can someone aged 18, with all the wonderful life experience of this truly lost and totally forsaken generation, be the same as someone nudging 50? What possible sense does it make?
Then there’s the little issue of… hold your breath for this mystic revelation… the Great Unknown of Marketing called market segmentation. Yep, markets have they-thar segments, Beulah May Obfuscating Trashcan. These also happen to relate to real buying patterns, in case someone hadn’t noticed.
How to misread obsolete demographics
An example of Demographics For The Senile comes in the improbable form of professional wrestling. The current big news is that All Elite Wrestling (AEW) is beating Wrestling Entertainment (WE) in the key 18-49 demographic. That IS the market fact, but the spin is misleading and misread severely.
These products are in direct competition in the same market. We gets around $245 million for its product. AEW gets about $45 million. There’s a lot to play for, when AEW is clearly making inroads and winning the ratings.
The 18-49 demographic is like an old road sign at best. The destinations, however, have changed, and the people going to those destinations have changed a lot.
Nor is this in any possible way an accurate representation of the market.
What, do people suddenly have money and start watching wrestling at age 18? No, they don’t. A lot of people start watching and buying a lot earlier. (You should be able to tell by the sizes of the merchandise you sell, but hey, that’d be working for a living, wouldn’t it?)
Is a 28-year-old an identical twin of a 12 year old or 18 year old or a 49 year old? Will success spoil the saintly image of Omniscient Marketing?
The misreading, in this case, is a lot worse than usual. AEW is definitely making a lot of ground against WE. This rather obvious fact is as much due to market positioning as any other factor. The demographics aren’t telling anything like the whole story, even when favourable to AEW.
AEW has positioned itself as the new guy, high intensity, and it’s been picking up a lot of WE stars…and the fans of those WE stars. WE, meanwhile, has reduced its booking options by reducing the number of stars. There are only so many matches you can make with lower numbers. It’s that simple.
To be strictly fair to WE, even if I don’t agree in the slightest with anything they’ve done in the last few months:
- A lot of the shuffling seems structural, based on business goals.
- They did have a lot of people to fit in to a finite number of shows, and it was looking crowded.
- Dollar values do matter, and what’s spent on what can’t be discounted.
- The people they’ve released weren’t just ditched with nowhere to go. Nearly all of them have found new gigs pretty easily.
- Vince McMahon is nobody’s idea of an idiot, even according to people who know him well. The WE market interaction, however, is opaque, murky and stagnant. He’s a sitting duck for the scatology.
However – A lot of fans don’t like the releases, or the way WE is playing its cards. They’re complaining about individual matches and storylines. That’s a first in market terms, and it’s a potentially brutal market environment in progress.
Major talents have been leaving WE like water through a hole in a bucket, and the response has been savage. Vince McMahon has been getting mercilessly hammered for his decisions for years.
Now the market wisdom, and other contradictions in terms
This type of market positioning reality doesn’t depend on demographics. The demographics can get up and leave anytime they want. Ratings can be and often are the sneezes of a head cold, or maybe pneumonia.
The marketing point here is that AEW is hitting hard directly into WE’s market. Using an obsolete oversize off-target demographic model doesn’t exactly help you look at the current market position. How do you know what to do?
Presumably, at least a bit more effort into market analysis is sometimes done by someone. That’s not at all obvious. Trundling along doing what you did before to decreasing ratings doesn’t look too “dynamic”, to put it mildly.
Market share does matter. If anyone’s extrapolating bandwidths of viewers based on ratings, (bandwidths are percentiles up and down based on moving viewer figures) it’s telling another, much grimmer, story for WE.
Failure to segment and study this ever-more ridiculous broad demographic is basically creating a useless and potentially dangerous vacuum. You can’t, (and shouldn’t) try to interpret a damn thing from such a scattergun set of undefined baseline stats. This market votes with hits on the sets as much as live show butts on seats.
Now the question – How long can this farcical demographic continue to exist? Time to go, and go fast. Meanwhile, if you must do these age-based things as a basic rule – Remember who identifies with what ages. It’d help, a lot.
