Introduction
The major markets for apparel have traditionally been the older more mature economies such as Western Europe and North America (Jones, 2002) but these markets currently present a number of severe challenges to apparel marketing practitioners such as saturation and falling prices. In addition, the structure of their populations is changing in ways which most experts would regard as unhelpful. The most obvious manifestation of these changes is the rapid ageing of the population. In the UK, for example, the proportion of the population aged 65 and over is set to rise considerably after 2010. The projection for 2021 is that (in the UK) that group will have risen from 15.7 per cent of the population in 1997 to 20.1 per cent while the proportion between 15 and 45 will have fallen from 42.2 to 37.1 per cent over the same period (ONS, 2004). This produces a number of macro-economic challenges such as a deterioration in the ratio of workers to retired people, for example. In relation to apparel markets there is a more specific problem in that conventional wisdom dictates that younger people are more interested in fashion than older people who have different spending priorities.
There are, of course, other dimensions to the demographic profile of a country including gender and racial mix and this Special Edition presents the results of research into a range of these issues in a range of countries as specifically applied to the marketing of apparel. The primary focus is on the issue of age and its influence on purchasing behaviour.
One of the more interesting issues is the alleged growing disparity between the behavioural and chronological age of today’s older consumers. A number of researchers have argued that today’s older people feel younger than people of the same age a few generations ago. Researchers at the Vienna Institute of Demography carrying out research for the Daily Telegraph,for example, argued that the standardised average age (standardises to reflect remaining life expectancy) in the UK was 37.9 in 2001 but will fall to 30.2 in 2100 and that “older people in the future will not behave like today’s older people” (Highfield, 2005).
The paper by Mumel and Prodnik studies grey consumers in an emerging market and stresses variations of behaviour within the older age groups. It draws marketing implications from the research as does the paper by Rocha, Hawkins and Hammond which looks at the behaviour of consumers in three countries in relation to age, gender and nationality. The papers by Martin and Peters, Stephen and Grant and Xu and Paulins all examine aspects of the behaviour of young female fashion consumers. The paper by Fadiga, Misra and Ramirez is a much more statistical nature than the journal normally carries and I recognise that many readers will not be comfortable with the theoretical aspects of the paper, but it contains valuable insights into price and expenditure elasticities in apparel markets which is an issue we have covered before in the journal (Jones, 2002) as well as isolating the impact on spending of age and gender so I felt it was useful to include the paper in this edition. The paper by Littrell, Ma and Halepete investigates consumer attitudes to “Fair Trade” products and how attitudes change with age.
Therefore, the range of issues covered is wide and the mix of papers is both interesting and instructive and makes, I believe, a useful contribution to the literature on this important topic. However, I would suggest that the basic question of the way in which older people see themselves as consumers in the twenty-first century is one which needs more research in particular as previous research suggests that normally the spending power held by the various age groups within a population does move in parallel with the actual distribution of the population as between those age groups (Jones, 1999).
Richard M. Jones
