The Age Curve: How to Profit from the Coming Demographic Storm

Discovering a Generation’s Personality

The principle of supply and demand can play out in many directions and give you the real secrets to understanding a generation’s personality. It is very simple really.

As shown in Figure 1.1, there are five distinct generations alive in the United States today. Only two can yield worthwhile returns on a marketer’s investment because they follow small generations and therefore spawn expanding markets. These two are the seventy-eight million Baby Boomers and the soon-to-be one hundred million Echo Boomers, or Gen Y. Both of these generations lack an adequate infrastructure to serve their changing needs, whether it is retail, social, legal, or health care.

Figure 1-1. The five generations in the United States. ...