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KNOWLEDGE BITES - BROUGHT TO YOU BY D&M RESEARCH

Welcome to Knowledge Bites, periodic bite sized pieces of knowledge exchange, designed to be consumed immediately without ruining your appetite for the rest of the day.

Entrée

Who will teach the over 55's to tap?
Our latest Internet Usage and Tenure Study reveals a significant opportunity for a smart brand to connect with older consumers by showing them the way to use the Internet. Potentially exploited through service bundling and partnership with either an IT, or ISP provider, the opportunity would suit a brand with an existing over 55 profile, or one aspiring to tap this important market in the future.

Mains

Senior Selection
Thanks for reading on. Consider this, there are now 11.1M Internet users aged 16+ in Australia, and although usage is highest amongst 16-24 year olds (94%), most other age groups now show incidence rates of between 75% and 90% (see table 1) - all except the 55 and over age group. Over 55's are the only age group without a majority presence on-line (39%), the only age group under-represented on-line (31% of the population and 17% of Internet Users), and represent almost 2 in 3 of the total non-user population (2.8M of the 4.4M offline). Surely this represents a significant market opportunity to someone or some brand!

Bear with us - although not without barriers (cost, access, and "know how") the research suggests that the offline over 55's represent not only an opportunity for an ISP to grow their market, but also for a smart brand to connect with this important segment. With this in mind an ISP, IT hardware, software, training or even traditional business could surely prosper by finding innovative, and more importantly synergistic ways to entice the nearly 3 million over 55's to join the on-line community.

Some ideas worthy of consideration include creative bundling of traditional products already reaching this market (eg insurance, superannuation, clubs, pharmaceuticals, healthcare etc) with new products such as IT hardware, Internet access, or even computer training. Marketing professionals surely will do better than this humble researcher in creating and building these products, but with the size of the prize – almost 3 million people we suspect someone will. Why not think about your products, could they could benefit from such a strategy?

Table 1:
Profile of age: General population versus Internet usage Australians 16+ yrs

Meanwhile the Internet reaches more people than ever and continues to mature.
The Internet should no longer be considered a new medium, having being around nearly a decade, but more importantly now being used by over 7 in 10 Australians aged 16 years + (11.1 Million), who have nearly 5 years experience on average.

It is now just another medium like print, radio, TV, and phones - people know how to use it and have used it for a long time. A majority of users (55%) have used the Internet for over 3 years, almost 4 in 10 (37%) over 5 years, and 1 in 5 (19%) have used the Internet for over 7 years!

And on-line research therefore can now reach most of the market demographics, and is being used extensively as a cost effective and rich research experience for researchers, clients, and respondents alike.

Consider also that a recent on-line survey* by D&M revealed that nearly 4 in 10 on-line respondents claim they would be Very Unlikely to do similar surveys on the phone for no reward! On-line can actually get to respondents that are no longer accessible through traditional methods.

Of course, research health warnings need to be heeded and agencies need to give due consideration when sampling those with the lowest Internet usage penetrations, such as the over 55's (39%), Lower household incomes (48%), Non-workers (55%) and Blue collar households (61%). Ask your research agency to ensure they over-sample these groups and weight the data back to ABS by collecting offline measures of Internet usage such as this one.

Dessert

Want to know more?
We are happy to provide more information on any of the information in Knowledge Bites. To get dessert please forward your requests to Derek at: derek@dandmresearch.com.au or call us on 02 9565 2655.

Next month we will bring you some exciting results from another of our recent surveys that looks at the new male consumer, "The Metrosexual" and tells what women really think about it all!

Sauces:
Internet Usage & Tenure Survey, D&M Research Sept-Dec QTR 2004, *Parallel Research Participation Study, D&M research & pureprofile November 2004, Albert Einstein

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