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

Chapter 3. Bell Curves, Pies, and Your “Best Customer”

The customer who sustains your business has a static description. For Japanese motorcycles, the description is a sixteen- to twenty-four-year-old male. Problems occur because the actual customer is a real person. He or she is aging in the parade passing through your marketplace and is therefore not static. Maybe we don’t think about aging because it is so slow.

Along with everyone else on the generational parade route, your customer today will be somewhere else in the years ahead. His or her wants and needs today can be very different five years from now. Your success depends on whether there are an increasing number of bodies in the population aging and moving toward the static description ...