The McCrindle Blog

The McCrindle Research Consumer Trends Wheel is our proprietary device for assessing the impact of 6 key areas on existing or prospective consumers. Demographical, social, generational, financial, technological and attitudinal factors are analysed in this consumer trends scan process. Here is a general example with some of the key impacts transforming today's global consumers. For individualised or targeted consumer trends analysis, do not hesitate to get in contact.

Click here to download the McCrindle Consumer Trends Wheel:

Generation Alpha are those born since 2010. They’ll be the largest generation our world has ever seen, the most technologically aware and the most influential.

What will Australia look like in 2034, the year when first cohort of Generation Alphas are in their early 20s?

1. The population of Melbourne will be 5.9 million (that’s larger than the whole of Victoria today).

2. Australia will have reached 32 million (up from 23 million currently).

3. The global population will be 8.8 billion (that’s twice what it was when the parents of Generation Alpha were born in the early 1980’s).

4. India will have surpassed China as the world’s most populous nation.

5. There will be more Australians aged over 60 than under 20 for the first time in our history (a sign of our ageing population).

6. Australia’s median age (where half the population is younger and half is older) will be 40. It was 29 when the parents of Gen Alpha were born.

7. The most common household type will be the couple, no kids households, for the first time ever eclipsing the nuclear family of today (couple with children).

Source: McCrindle Research, ABS

Note: Projections are based on the current growth rates: 1.1% for the world, 1.6% Australia, 1.88% Melbourne, China and India’s numeric growth, and ABS median age forecasts and household type data.

Mark McCrindle's book The ABC of XYZ gives insights and practical strategies to help parents, teachers and managers bridge the gaps and engage with each generation. However, this book is more than a research-based reference work or valuable 'how to' guide - it is also a very interesting read with facts and lists to which members of each generation will reminisce. 

Beyond Z, Meet Generation Alpha: McCrindle Research

We’ve conducted a lot of research for students and the education sector today and have found very strong trends from the traditional, structured auditory left-brain learner who learns sequentially through repetition and auditory processes to the right-brain creative, engaging, participative, and collaborative learner of today.

Schools and classrooms have responded effectively to this trend through the implementations of learning stations, deploying the teaching as facilitator, endorsing group work, providing real world case studies, and teaching through kinaesthetic learning methods. This, to the credit of schools is how they’ve been able to engage with a changing learner needs while maintaining educational excellence.

The big question for businesses is how they are responding to these key trends. The workplace is full of Generation X who have stepped into leadership and management roles and Generation Y who want to be active in leadership from the start of their careers. New generations do not want to sit and listen but are entrepreneurial, enjoy taking responsibility, and learn through collaborative, hands-on interactions.

Therefore, whether for a staff meeting, training session, or organisational conferences, it is essential that delivery involves collaborative means that are visual in output. Through interactive technologies such as voting hand-sets, data can be gathered, displayed, and discussed in real-time. While there has been some discussion about ‘death by powerpoint,’ presentations that are not visually communicated lack their capacity to fully engage with attendees in a visual way – using relevant visuals to communicate insights is now more important than ever.

– Mark

As researchers, getting the opinions of stakeholders and influencers is a key part of our focus and is readily achieved through the research technology Mark McCrindle utilises before and during his presentations.

Find out more about the innovative output methods we utilise and Mark’s professional presentations, and download Mark's speaking pack.

What are the hottest topics making their way across the conference circuit? When engaging with and understanding today’s emerging generations, Generation Y and Generation Z, business leaders and educators must be aware of the changing landscape of Australia’s global youth culture and respond to the trends shaping this customer segment.

Social Media: The what, why and how?

In just five years social media has emerged as a massive communication channel. Understanding how to engage with customers, communities and stakeholders in this new digital landscape is essential for all organisations. It is crucial to grasp why people use social media, who the key users are, what works best, and where the trends are taking us.

Generation Z: Engaging with today’s students, consumers, and new employees

There are 4.6 million reasons to engage Generation Z, the students of today and university graduates, employees and consumers of tomorrow. They are truly the 21st Century generation, with the whole of their formative years lived in this century. While Gen Zs are today’s children and teenagers, within a decade they will comprise almost 1 in 5 workers and will hold significant purchasing power. Recognising and responding to the defining attributes of this emerging generation and gaining the knowledge and skills to engage this post-literate, multimodal, and tech-savvy generation is key.

Tweens & teens: Understanding Australia’s global youth culture

Where once life was a clearly defined journey from childhood to adulthood, our non-linear world includes a range of emerging life-stages including pre-teens, tweens, kippers and boomerang kids. These new consumer segments add greater complexity in engaging the youth audience. Understanding these demographic segments and the best practice communication and engagement strategies is of central importance to winning over today’s under 30s.

Claire Madden is the Research Director at McCrindle Research. As a social researcher, Claire shares how the use of social media is key in communicating with the emerging generations, unwrapping the key characteristics and trends of today’s Gen Z, and giving insights towards best engagement strategies for Australia’s global youth culture. Download Claire’s speaking pack for more info, or why not get in touch directly to find out more?

The 2002 Federal Budget, delivered by Treasurer Peter Costello introduced the baby bonus scheme, aimed to lighten the financial load for new parents. The Baby Bonus Scheme initially granted $2,500 in tax cuts per year for parents of newborns, an amount which was amended to lump-sum payments of $3,000 from 1 July 2004 and progressively rising to its current amount of $5,000 (now paid in 13 instalments).

Baby bonus stimulates birth rate

The baby bonus certainly had an influence on the birth rate, which increased significantly, hitting a peak of 2.0 in 2008. Births continued to grow, and 2011 saw Australian births exceed 300,000 (301,617), a record that is being broken year on year. In fact, we are amidst a bigger baby boom than even the original post-WWII baby boom incurred, which resulted in Australia’s largest-ever generation – the Baby Boomers.

The Baby Bonuses (the 3.1 million babies born since the introduction of the Baby Bonus Scheme in 2012) are Australia’s first generation paid simply for being born.

The Baby Bonus and the resulting surge in births over the last decade has eased the peak of the ageing population challenge and added to our population growth and the economic stimulus that has flowed from this.

Misconceptions on first-time mums

There are, however, some misconceptions about the baby bonus and the births that it facilitated.

When the 2002 Baby Bonus was first introduced, it was predicted by some that the incentive would encourage an increase in teenage, single and young mums. However, the ABS data shows that the fertility rate for mums aged between 16 and 19 has actually declined over the last decade. In fact, the fertility rate for teenagers has been declining for more than three decades now – for example, the fertility rate of sixteen year old women has decreased 55% since 1982.

The trend over the last decade has been increasing fertility rate amongst older women. Over the last decade, the fertility rate of women aged 35-39 has been greater than that of women in their early twenties. The fertility rate of a 32 year old woman is ten times greater than that of a 17 year old!

Baby bonus dissolution

On 1 March 2014, when the Baby Bonus Scheme is finally put to bed after more than 13 years and replaced changes to Family Tax Benefit Schedule A, it will have left a legacy in terms of the generation it created. The economic impact and productivity of the Baby Bonus Generation will shape this nation over the century ahead.

With just over 9 months to go until its dissolution, there’s still time for prospective parents to gain a benefit from the Baby Bonus Scheme. We may well see a final surge of births that end this legacy of Australia’s baby bonus and the Baby Bonus Generation.

Sources: ABS Cat 3301.0 – Births, Australia, 2011, and McCrindle Research, 2013

Australia’s ageing continues

In just two decades Australia’s median age has increased nearly 5 years (from 32.7 to 37.5 today). In the last 5 years the proportion of our population aged under 20 has declined by a percentage point to be just 1 in 4 Australians (25%) while the proportion aged over 60 has increased by a similar amount to be 1 in 5 (20%). Based on these current demographic trends, by 2028, for the first time in Australia’s history there will be more people aged over 60 than aged under 20.

Click here to download this report as a PDF.

A good news story

The ageing of our population is of course a good news story. The Standardised Death Rate (deaths per 1,000 population) continues to fall (to 5.59- half that of births) while life expectancy continues to rise.

When Australia’s Age Pension was introduced in 1909, life expectancy at birth was 57 while today it exceeds 80. While the accessibility age of 65 for males has not changed in a century, longevity certainly has. In fact so dramatic has been the increase in life expectancy, that averaged across males and females, Australians have gained 25 years of life expectancy in the last 100 years. Or 3 months of life every 12 months of time!

Downagers: redefining the older life stages

Today’s Baby Boomers are the ultimate downagers, redefining lifestages, and reinventing retirement. They have adult children at home longer, they’re buying and selling property later in life, and remaining active in the workforce later than ever before. This is a response to the improved life and health realities. In fact based on years of life expectancy, a 65 year old today is the equivalent of a 54 year old in 1950. It is therefore of little surprise that Australians are younger longer and working later.

Older workers: technical, professional and entrepreneurial

Australia’s workers aged 65 and older currently comprise 3.4% of Australia’s total workforce (393,000 out of 11, 589, 000). The top two job categories of older Australians where more than 1 in 5 are aged 65 or over are professionals (21.4%) and managers (20.4%).

Of Australians 65 and over currently in the workforce, 72% are employees, 23% have their own business, 4% are employers, and 1% are contributing family workers.

Older Australians work the longest hours employed as managers in numerous industries (35 hours per week) and the least hours when employed in the community and personal service work industry (18 hours).

Across all of the industries, the average Australian worker aged 65 and older works 27 hours per week as an employee, 36 hours per week as an employer, 26 hours per week as a business owner, and 18 hours per week as a contributing family worker. Older workers are looking for great flexibility in their working hours and are increasingly not working full-time.

41% of Australians aged 65 and older who work as managers run their own business. This is the highest rate of self-employment across the major industries for this age group. Other industries that display a high percentage of older Australians running their own businesses are technicians and trade workers (27%), labourers (26%) and business services (20%).

As the Director of McCrindle Research, Mark McCrindle headed up the McCrindle Baynes Village Community Report – the largest study into retirement village residents ever conducted in Australia. The project involved a 57 question pen and paper survey, deployed to 181 villages managed by 7 operators. It received over 10,000 completed surveys, representing almost 1 in 10 village residents Australia-wide.

Want to know more?

Click here to download our Speaking and Research Pack for the Retirement and Aged Care Sectors.

Click here to read more about our Speaking services.

Our recently released 2013 National Baby Names Report shows the growing preference nation-wide for softer-sounding names for girls and firmer-sounding names for boys.

The Top 20 list of boys’ and girls’ names across Australia shows that over half of girls’ names end in an ‘ah’ sound and 95% end in a vowel or ‘y’. In comparison, only 10% of boys’ in the Top 20 end with a vowel.

The Top 100 list shows that 81% of girls’ names overall end in a vowel or vowel sound (including ‘y’ and ‘ah’ sounds), compared to only 23% of boys’ names overall.

Girls’ names are longer and more flowing compared to the often short and sharp boys’ names.

In the Top 100, 37 girls’ names have 3 or more syllables with 9 of these having 4 syllables—Elizabeth, Angelina, Indiana/ Indianna and Gabriella.

In comparison, there are only 18 boys’ names with 3 or more syllables; only 1 of these, Alexander, has 4 syllables and this will likely be shortened to Alex anyway!

When it comes to single-syllable names, boys lead the way with 14 one-syllable names in the Top 10. This is twice as many as the girls!

Although the trend seems to be gender-relevant names, parents are still opting for unisex names.

Only 1 name in the Top 100, in its unchanged spelling form, Charlie, is commonly considered to be interchangeable between the two sexes—the rest are distinctly boys’ or girls’ names.

Some of the girls names featured in the Top 100 that can also be used as boys’ names are: Harper, Jade and Mackenzie.

On the other hand, parents of girls are using the pool of currently popular boys’ names on a much larger scale, some of these include: Riley, Charlie, Tyler, Bailey, Jordan, Cameron, Ashton, Kai, Jessie, Alex.

The 2013 National Baby Names Report features Australia’s Top 100 Baby Names for both boys and girls. This is Australia’s only national list and analysis of the top baby names that cross Australia’s states and territories. This is especially timely with the Royal Baby due in less than 3 months!

Download our full report to find out more interesting trends and findings!

Today’s educated audience and increasingly informed business world need content that is compelling, engaging, and informative. Traditional methods of communication, delivery, and input no longer suffice, but must be replaced by research based material that is innovatively delivered and strategically focused.

For more information download Mark's speaking pack, visit markmccrindle.com or contact us on +61 2 8824 3422 or info@mccrindle.com.au.

Click here to download the PDF document.

1. Research Based

Organisational leaders are increasingly seeing the importance of business intelligence and social analysis in driving growth. To increase sales, a deeper understanding of customers is imperative; to develop product innovations, an understanding of the changing trends and expectations is required; and to drive productivity, analysis of staff and their motivations is essential.

2. Innovatively Delivered

In a 140 character tweet-based, YouTube world, data and information must be eye-catching and presented in innovatively delivered ways. Data visualisation through infographics and visual presentations enable leaders to interpret the data and communicate the trends to make strategic decisions. Interactive technologies and live-feedback sessions can engage audiences like never before.

3. Strategically Focused

Communicating the trends and insights to decision-makers and influencers is key in our time-poor, complex, and outcome driven world. Our current economic landscape demands discussion and content that is strategically focused.

Mark McCrindle delivers cutting-edge topics on the demographic shifts, social trends, emerging technologies, and diverse generations. His sessions can help you derive new business strategies, engage with new consumers, and understand the trends and insights of the business landscape into 2020 and beyond.

Click here to download the PDF document.

Seven years ago McCrindle Research began in a spare room of Mark and Ruth McCrindle’s house. With a psychology background, market research experience, and a passion to conduct world class research, Mark began the McCrindle Research story. 

Since then we’ve been commissioned by scores of clients, completed hundreds of projects, interviewed thousands of people, analysed hundreds of thousands of online survey responses, and interpreted millions of data points for our demographic summaries. Our research has been disseminated through hundreds of media articles, more than 10,000 of Mark’s books, and more than 100,000 of our acclaimed A5 population maps.

As Australia’s leading data visualisation researchers, our infographics, slide decks, whitepapers and research summaries have been meeting quite a need for world class research and analysis communicated in relevant, innovative ways. Our analytics tells us that they’ve been getting thousands of views and downloads each day. 

So if you are looking to analyse your market, identify consumer segments, understand the demographics, engage with diverse generations, or respond to the emerging trends, then check out our research packs, Mark’s speaking pack or get in contact for a quote. Through commissioned research projects, focus groups and online surveys, demographic reports, strategic workshops, and keynote presentations, we help organisations know the times.

1. Demographic Qs

Make sure you ask demographic questions at the beginning of the survey. As a survey goes on, respondents are tempted to drop out, particularly at the end. Respondents are time-poor and privacy aware. 

Ensuring demographic questions are completed will give you a wealth of power when analysing the findings, so that you can filter the findings – even across multiple factors. Also, don’t ask questions that you don’t need. If you’re unsure you’re going to use the findings, then don’t include it. 

2. Survey flow

Good research tells a story and good survey design takes respondents on a journey. Cluster questions under similar topics together, and make sure that each section weaves seamlessly into the next. If the survey is a collection of topics or an omnibus, just tell them upfront or have an introductory statement preceding each section. Respondents are people, and people appreciate candidness. #honestyworks

3. Provide options

Make sure your answer options are comprehensive and cater for a range of responses. If not, at least give the respondent an option to select ‘none of the above’ or ‘other (please specify)’. There is nothing more frustrating than feeling like you’re being boxed into categories e.g. “I love this product” “I like this product” “This product is the best” “I will never use any other product again”. 

Effective surveys are based on scientific methodologies and so for the results to have credibility, the questions and options likewise need credibility.

4. Sample size

Ensure that your survey is sent to a solid sample size, particularly for national surveys. The more breakdowns you want to do, the more important the sample size (e.g. breakdown of results by State and age – Gen Y males in NSW). This is particularly true if you want to take your findings to the media or use in advertising/promoting material. When stating that a sample is nationally representative, make sure the percentages of the sample align with national figures for gender, age and state. 

A useful visual tool (and one we use for our projects) is our Population map, based on national statistics from the ABS.

5. Use ‘forced response’ sparingly

Oh, the perils of forced response questions! On the one hand, forced response is a handy feature to combat militant mouse clickers who blaze through surveys, unafraid to progress through each question (obstacle) in a trance-like clicking frenzy (what we like to call the ‘Dance of the index finger”). On the other hand, being forced to answer a ‘Please give comment’ question when you really don’t have an opinion may as well be the same thing as inserting an ‘End survey now’ button.

For further assistance with survey design or research, please feel free to contact Hester Kahei :)