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David Perry

Beyond Boomers: Gen Y offers a great opportunity

They are our hope for a bright future in Mattressville, USA. They don’t keep their old bedding for ridiculous periods of time. And they are planning to replace their new bedding sooner than their parents plan to replace theirs.

We are talking about Generation Y, the children of that most famous generation of all: the Baby Boomers.

We’ve all heard about the marketing clout wielded by the Boomers, and it is considerable, but there are a couple of things about the Boomers that we must keep in mind. The older Boomers are approaching retirement. And the younger Boomers are going to be facing some big college expenses.

What’s a bedding marketer to do? Easy. Get ready to target Gen Y. Those consumers, born between 1976 and 1994, are going to be the next big spenders, it appears. There are 76 million of them. That’s not quite as many as in the Boomers crowd — 78 million— but it’s a huge number nonetheless.

Savvy marketers need to be learning all they can about Gen Y. That’s one of the points we made in a special Generational Buying 2005 report, published in Furniture/Today in January and sponsored by GE.

That report offers some extremely encouraging news for bedding marketers, which I admit I should have highlighted for you sooner. (Hey, back in January I was in the middle of a hectic Las Vegas bedding market, as I recall.)

Our consumer research found that Gen Y consumers are far less likely to keep bedding for more than 10 years. A whopping 54% of Baby Boomers told us the bedding they were replacing was more than 10 years old — and well past its prime, we will assume. In contrast, only 22% of Gen Y consumers said the bedding they were replacing was more than 10 years old.

We also asked how long these consumers plan to keep their new bedding. Almost half of the Boomers — 49% — said it would be for more than 10 years. For Gen Y, the figure was only 25%.

There was very good news on the shorter end of the replacement cycle. A total of 20% of Gen Y consumers plan to keep their new bedding for less than five years. The figure for Boomers is 13%.

That gap of 7 percentage points is a huge opportunity for bedding marketers. Anything we can do to lower the bedding replacement cycle is good for everyone: producers, retailers and the consumers themselves.
But will we automatically get those dollars in bedding? Well, we have plenty of competition: Consumer electronics (will the iPod phenomenon ever slow down?), vacations, fancy cars, etc.

Our challenge is to learn all we can about Gen Y and tailor marketing messages and products to them. Let’s seize this wonderful opportunity.