Prime Time Women – great piece on segmentation and demographics.

If you’re looking to generate a decent classroom discussion on market segmentation or the use of demographics to identify attractive markets, this Advertising Age Video interview will do nicely. Marti Barletta, author of Prime Time Women, shatters some myths about what is or isn’t an attractive demographic. In particular, she scoffs at the conventional view that the most highly coveted markets are men ages 18 – 24.

According to Barletta, “other than beer and pizza they don’t really buy a lot.” On the other hand, individuals over the age of 50 control 79% of all financial assets, and on a per capita spending basis, spend 2 ½ times what the younger group spends. She punctuates this with the compelling statistic that women in households control 80% or more of household spending.

If you’ve ever taught marketing, you’ve probably had this conversation in your classes. Still, I’m amazed at how narrow the worldview of my students generally is. Barletta has no answer for why corporations with access to the same data continue to largely ignore prime time women, but she believes failure to redress this marketing wrong will impact the bottom line directly: something like 96% of the net population growth in the next ten years will take place in the over-50 age group.

This video is short enough (nine minutes) and sufficiently relevant to enhance a classroom discussion of target market strategies, demographics, household consumer roles, gender, and market segmentation.

INCLASSMEDIA™ – What’s this blog about anyway?

This blog is an attempt to start a conversation about the impact of different media and information content on college instructor effectiveness, student learning, and the overall classroom experience in general. I am not an expert in instructional design or its most recent incarnation, Instruction 2.0, but have had some success illustrating course concepts and generating significant classroom discussion with more visual content, audio, and video.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have launched a business that integrates course and textbook concepts with topical business news. I will not shill for the business here other than to say that you can reach me at marty@inclassmedia.com should you want more information.

Over the past five years teaching college business courses, I have gone from an informal “news” discussion at the start of classes to creating content highlighting course concepts in a specific news context. Students will frequently remark on this part of the class in their course evaluations. Students will also reference “news” discussions in exam essays. While I have not scientifically gauged these responses, it appears that the visual and multimedia presentation of course concepts enhances retention. At the very least, it livens up the classroom discussion.

And now that I am about to adopt my fifth different marketing textbook in five years, I maintain that textbooks—at least those in the disciplines in which I have been teaching—have become commoditized to the extent that publishers will mix and match chapters in an attempt to customize and provide value to instructors. Hence, my interest in ancillary information sources and different media that complement basic course textbooks.

Though my intent with this blog is to identify and hold forth on different media content and formats that map to specific business course topics, I am sure I will meander into the topics of textbook and online content usage in classrooms, the value of ancillaries from publishers, video in the classroom, and others.

Finally, though my teaching experience is 100% in the business disciplines of management and marketing, instructors in other disciplines may find some common issues worth discussing.