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At the first session of the ASTA-NTA Joint Hispanic Business Development Task Force in Los Angeles last fall, keynote speaker Glenn Llopis, CEO of the Center for Hispanic Leadership, showed a short video filled with statistics and demographic charts that pointed to a rise in the wealth and power of Hispanics in the U.S. It made the case to marketers that communities of Spanish-speaking Americans offer a rich opportunity for just about anyone selling anything.
Llopis asked the mostly Hispanic audience how viewing the video made them feel. Those who responded said, in variations, that they felt tremendous pride, and the sense that the future belonged to them.
He said he had also shown the same video, and asked the same question, to a primarily Anglo audience, and the first person to raise his hand said, "It makes me wish I were Hispanic."
After reading this week's cover story (see "Widening wanderlust,") about the growth of economic power of Brazil, Russia, India, China and other emerging markets, you might envy those in the travel industry catering to anyone living east of Europe or south of the U.S.
While no one is predicting stagnation for America, Western economies and populations are expected to grow much more slowly, and the U.S. economy, the world's largest, is likely to be surpassed by China by 2030.
Should that make us all wish we were Chinese?
I spent most of the last two weeks in Europe, ending up in Amsterdam to witness the naming of 10 Viking River Cruises Longships.
Viking Chairman Torstein Hagen is a worldly man with deep knowledge and experience in finance and marketing. Yet he made it very clear who the target market was for his young, fast-growing company: English-speaking people over the age of 55 in the U.S., the U.K. and Australia.
Hagen, who is 70, says his product "is for people like me who want to ... travel with people like myself."
Could Hagen be missing the boat? Or are the future-focused executives of the World Travel & Tourism Council, meeting next month in Abu Dhabi, unaware of something Hagen knows?
It's instructive to remember that about seven years ago, U.S. marketers were keenly focused on the generation bulge known as baby boomers. I recall listening to one marketing expert say that over the next five years, baby boomers would be inheriting $5 trillion.
It was predicted that the two categories that boomers were most likely to spend inheritance on were real estate and travel. The unpredicted recession might have caused a delay in that spend, but the current spike in river cruising could be owed, in part, to the fact that the very people Hagen targets are finally loosening up and spending inherited wealth.
Long-term trends and demographics are essential for exploiting long-term opportunities, but for many of us, in order to get to the long term, we need to make the most of the short term. The river cruising phenomenon, which is showing the greatest growth of any industry segment, is a timely reminder of this.
The baby boomer generation has been a marketer's dream since diaper sales spiked in the late 1940s. (Note to self: Buy stock in Kimberly-Clark, manufacturer of Depend.)
One consultant who advises companies on selling to baby boomers can't understand why anyone would want to market to any other group, saying that selling to Generations X or Y is "a rough neighborhood."
Or, as another generation-marketing consultant put it: "Fish where the fish are."
Apparently, there are still a lot of fish in European rivers.
Email Arnie Weissmann at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter.