Do age groups differ in their buying?
Different age groups have different needs, this is rather obvious. Consumers of different ages find themselves in different life situations, for example, starting their first job (and paycheque), having children, or retiring. Consequently, consumers of different ages often buy different products, and/or buy from product categories at different rates. Different age groups may also buy different variants (SKUs) within a category, for example, older people are more likely to live in single person households and hence are more likely to buy smaller pack sizes.
But within product categories do consumers of different ages buy different brands? It’s commonly assumed that different brands appeal to and are targeted at different age groups. However, studies profiling many hundreds of brands, across dozens of categories; from cigarettes to computer games to mortgages; show that competing brands sell to essentially the same sort of people (Hammond, Ehrenberg and Goodhardt 1996; Kennedy and Ehrenberg 2001a,b; Kennedy, Ehrenberg and Long 2000; Kennedy and Ehrenberg 2000; Uncles and Lee 2006). Within each brand’s customer base there is a great deal of variation (i.e. different sorts of people), but the pattern of this variation is similar across brands. Take for example the customer bases’ of Canadian beer brands1 (Table 1). Their customers vary in terms of age – some customers are young, others are old, but the pattern of this variation is rather similar across the brands – all brands have roughly the same proportion of young consumers.
Despite differences in price, origin (from Mexico to Toronto) and brand image, these beer brands have basically the same customer profiles. About a third of customers are young and about a fifth are older. This indicates that younger consumers buy the same brands as older consumers.
But what about loyalty?
But underneath this big pattern of consumers buying similar brands irrespective of age might there be differences between the behaviour of consumers because of their age? It’s commonly assumed that younger consumers are fickle when it comes to brands, while older consumers are more loyal. For example, Young & Rubicam’s Simon Silvester (2002) maintains that over 35s have fixed brand repertoires and are unlikely to try new brands.
This assumption can be explained in two ways. The popular view is that young people, by virtue of their youth, are innately less loyal. Loyalty being a trait that gradually asserts itself as we age. A more prosaic explanation is that younger consumers of the category are in the process of forming their repertoire, so they trial brands and adopt some. Unlike older consumers, who have already established a repertoire of ‘favorite’ brands which they only change occasionally. Younger consumers therefore make up a disproportionate percentage of the consumers that are “swimming around” waiting to be caught by a brand. Younger consumers might represent 30% of category purchasers, but say 40% of those switching brands or trying a new one.
Empirical Tests
New brands, whose customer bases are by definition made up of newly acquired consumers, should skew towards younger buyers – if younger people are less loyal and so more easily acquired. Of course, some new brands choose to target an older demographic, so we should not expect all new brands to skew towards youth. Conversely some brands expressly target youth. So amongst this ‘noise’ we are simply looking for a broad trend that new brands are more likely to have customer profiles which skew towards youth compared to established brands.
This tendency to skew towards youth should also be evident amongst growing brands. This is because growth (and decline) has been shown to be largely due to customer acquisition (Riebe 2003). That is, growing brands are particularly good at acquiring new customers, and declining brands are particularly poor. And because younger buyers make up a disproportionate percentage of buyers available to be acquired, growing brands should skew slightly towards youth. We would also expect declining brands to skew older.2

Looking for evidence of such patterns, we analyzed 12 product categories and over 230 brands. These categories included fmcg’s, durable products and services. The survey and consumer panel data we used was generously provided by The Nielsen company in Australia and TNS in the UK. We separated new brands from established ones, and brands which grew from those that declined (relative to the category’s performance) over the years. We also tried to remove brands which skewed to particular age groups because of functional differences, (e.g. Kinder Surprise and Australian Pensioners Insurance Agency).
We began by calculating the proportion of each brand’s sales/customers from each of the age groups- the brand’s age profile. Then we compared each brand’s profile to the age profile for the product category. To quantify how well a brand performed in each age group, considering any age skew in the category, we calculated index numbers.3 For example, a beer brand that did particularly well amongst young consumers, having already taken into consideration that all beer consumption is skewed towards young adults, would have index numbers of greater than 100 across these age groups. We looked at each brand’s index numbers across age groups to identify brands that skewed towards particular demographic groups. Note that we are talking about younger consumers, not young consumers per se. This is because product categories have different age profiles, e.g. retirement homes generally sell to people of retirement age, but we would expect new and growing brands of retirement homes to skew towards younger retirees. Finally, we divided the brands into three groups- new, growing and declining, and looked for patterns within and across each group. Table 2 illustrates our approach.
Both of the new-to-market brands, Riva and Piazza D’Oro, skew towards young consumers. This is illustrated by the index numbers greater than 100 across the younger age groups and the mean value. Similarly, growing brands tend to skew towards consumers younger than the average category buyer (approx 45 y.o). Moreover, this pattern is more pronounced for the brands which grew particularly strongly, such as Nescafe and Lavazza. Furthermore, many of the declining brands skew towards older consumers, a tendency that is also evident in the mean value. Whilst there are some exceptions to these patterns, for example Cafe Aurora, more often than not, brands performed as expected. As we looked at other categories, we found that this was the broad pattern. Table 3 details the brands which did skew towards a particular demographic (70% of sample). Of these, new and growing brands were more likely to skew towards younger consumers than declining brands.
Discussion
Our finding that new and growing brands are more likely than declining brands to skew towards younger consumers, indicates that young consumers are a little easier to acquire. Young consumers are easier to win because many are new to the product category and aren’t yet established customers of other brands. Furthermore, this effect is visible because young consumers make up a disproportionate percentage of new category buyers. Conversely, older consumers, are (slightly) less likely to be acquired by new brands, because many of them have an established repertoire of brands to which they are loyal. This reminds us that brand loyalty is alive and well, and it is not easy to change the habitual loyalties of buyers and win them over from other brands.
However, consumers under 30 may not be the only ones entering the category and forming a repertoire of brands. In some categories, for example health insurance, new brands skewed towards old consumers aged 55+ because many consumers first start buying the category around this age. Indeed, across our sample, about 1 in 7 new brands skewed towards older consumers. This underscores that differences in loyalty are a function of when repertoires are being formed, not just chronological age. It also highlights that older consumers do buy newly launched brands, so their brand loyalties must not be overly entrenched.
Indeed, we find no real evidence that young people, are innately less brand loyal. If young people really were more fickle and more willing to experiment, then most new brands would have skewed substantially to youth. But they didn’t- only about half of the new brands we analyzed skewed towards younger consumers, and these skews were typically weak. This suggests that innate (e.g. personality) differences in loyalty are largely independent of age.
Our results also underscore the importance of acquisition for brand health. Declining brands tended to have older customer bases, which points to problems acquiring new customers. In contrast, growing brands were more likely to have younger customer bases, indicating they are particularly good at acquiring new customers. Acquisition is what keeps brands healthy.
Implications for marketing strategy
So if younger consumers are slightly easier to win as customers, should marketers make them the target of their efforts? Does it mean that brands targeted at younger consumers are more likely to succeed, and perhaps be more successful? This seems unlikely, as in many markets, young demographics account for a small portion of total sales. So even if a brand achieves astronomical growth among young consumers by targeting them, this is unlikely to have much impact on sales. Many spirits brands very successfully grew sales to the under 28 demographic, often doubling, quadrupling or even growing by twenty-fold among young consumers. But this growth contributed very little to the brand’s overall sales volume because sales were generally increasing from a very small base (i.e. 0% or 1% of sales). Young demographics account for a tiny proportion of category sales. In contrast, growth amongst older demographics, although more modest (i.e. 25% over 2 years), drove brand growth because these groups are so large.
Indeed, it is difficult for a brand to grow, and nearly impossible for it to be a big brand, without selling to consumers from all age groups. This is evident in our data, as well as previous research, and is important to remember when interpreting our results. Even the brands which substantially over or under-indexed in a particular demographics, had customers of all ages. Take for example, the spirits brand ‘Caribbean Twist’ which skews slightly to young consumers, with an index number of 155 for the under 28 y.o. age group. Only 3% of their sales came from this demographic, slightly more than for the average brand (2%). Even the brands that did skew towards particular age groups, still sold to consumers of all age groups, all of which deserve marketing attention.
Furthermore, younger consumers may be easier to win, but they may also be easier to lose too. A brand targeted at young consumers (e.g. Hubba Bubba chewing gum) is very likely to lose consumers simply as they grow older.
If your brand is growing, you should expect that a disproportionate percentage of your new customers will be young, or younger than your existing customers. But does this mean that all brands with growth objectives should skew their advertising and sales efforts towards younger consumers? If the brand is new, and therefore under time and budgetary pressure to prove its commercial viability, it makes sense to go for the easier targets, at least at first. For established brands, it’s important to reach younger consumers because they are learning about brands. However, no media strategy should deviate much from the demographic groups that deliver the most sales volume.
So fish where the fish are. The younger fish might be a little easier to catch but there are plenty of older, bigger ones looking for some tasty bait.
Footnotes
1 Data courtesy of Molson Breweries Canada. Region and year not revealed.
2 Though this is a weaker test of age driven loyalty because if a declining brand’s rate of acquisition collapses, then over time its customer base will age, irrespective of whether younger consumers are less loyal. Brands that are still acquiring new customers at a normal rate will retain a customer base of average age. While a brand which is not acquiring customers each year will find its customer base aging by one year.
3 As we were looking for a systematic pattern in the small deviations, index numbers, which magnify small differences were ideal.