Sorry, Young Man, You're Not the Most Important Demographic in Tech

Re:Sorry, Young Man, You're Not the Most Important Demograph... by xanados on Friday June 08, 2012 @05:22PM (#4086226)

Those aren't real stats. Those are just numbers on a page. That link doesn't include any methodology for how they collected these numbers, doesn't include any references, doesn't included any reason I should believe any of them whatsoever. Some of those numbers are either obviously false or obviously misleading, such as the theory that 51% of private wealth is controlled by women when we know the huge concentration of wealth in the US and know the huge disparity in sexes in the top 1% of earners. This statistic thus is either completely false (perhaps they surveyed a power law distribution or something), or their definition is extremely poorly represented by their choice of words.

Edit: It's probably not a good sign that they have two directly contradictory statistics for the amount of US private wealth controlled by women.

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Re:Sorry, Young Man, You're Not the Most Important Demograph... by enobrev on Friday June 08, 2012 @05:38PM (#4086281)

Not really interested in this specific argument about whether or not the OP has real statistics, but I thought this was interesting (and includes sources, which I haven't checked).

http://www.catalyst.org/publication/256/buying-power

http://www.she-conomy.com/report/marketing-to-women-quick-fa...

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Re:Sorry, Young Man, You're Not the Most Important Demograph... by batista on Saturday June 09, 2012 @05:35PM (#4089384)

>Some of those numbers are either obviously false or obviously misleading, such as the theory that 51% of private wealth is controlled by women when we know the huge concentration of wealth in the US and know the huge disparity in sexes in the top 1% of earners.

Whether the top earners are men and the huge disparity on Bill Gates/Larry Ellison level wealth do not matter at all in this discussion.

Advertisers and companies are not competing for THOSE people's money (except if they make private jets and luxury cars), they want the money of the average household. 100,000,000 families have brought Apple products, for example, and all of the top 1000 wealthiest guys just bought another 1,000-10,000 combined.

So, when they say they control 51% of private wealth, that might or might not be true overall, but it is very true for the kind of wealth that matters to companies/advertisers. And it is even more true that women also influence what the family will buy, even more so than men.

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