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