Tool Box
Issue No. 23 - June/Nuly 2005
Demise of the bowls club culture
by Dr David Corkindale and Dr David Corkindale
Recently Rupert Murdoch warned his fellow newspaper industry colleagues that if present trends continue the last newspaper will be printed in 2040 (1).
One of the contributory factors, he said, is that of people currently in the 18–34 year age group, 44% said they used an internet portal at least once a day for their source of news as opposed to 19% who would use a newspaper.
People who were in this age group 20 years ago would not have used the internet at all. This is a stark example of one cohort’s behaviour being very different from its predecessor, and of the possible consequences.
Many bowls clubs are declining, I understand. There are two problems: as members get older they drink less from the bar and it is the bar takings that help fund the club; also, playing bowls seems not to be what the current retirees want to do compared to those who retired 20 years ago. With hindsight, the bowls clubs were wrong to assume that many people when they retire automatically turn to bowls.
Both these examples illustrate the phenomena that we can not assume that as people reach a particular point in life they will behave like a previous group did at that point.
If we do want them to behave similarly, then we probably have to start to try to manage this early on. This clearly has marketing implications which we will explore here.
I will call this cohort marketing.
What are the marketing problems?
I remember working on the Guiness advertising account in London in the early 1970s. Someone discovered that most of it was drunk by older men and little by people in their twenties. A great fear was that those in their twenties would learn to like other drinks so that when they were older they would not drink Guiness, whose sales would then decline.
The strategy then was to seek to persuade young men to try Guiness and this was fairly well achieved. The trouble was that many said that they did not like it â...
