Ever wonder why today's youth love tattoos and body-piercing, while their parents, and especially their grandparents, very definitely don't?

Are you surprised that those in retirement today still save for "that rainy day" while today's baby boomers find "saving" not in their vocabulary?

Does it surprise you that someone, perhaps only a few years older or younger than you, seems so different that you have little in common? These same people are customers, your customers! What explains these differences? Charles Schewe has some answers.

Dr. Charles Schewe, highly regarded speaker, professor, consultant and author of more than ten books on marketing, originated generational marketing with his widely-acclaimed "The Power of Cohorts" article in American Demographics and in his newest book Defining Markets, Defining Moments (Wiley, 2002). Generational marketing differentiates target markets based on age and experiences shared during late adolescence and early adulthood. Over the past decade, Dr. Schewe has extended his generational marketing approach to include six age groups with yet a seventh now evolving. These groups span America's demographic landscape from those in their upper 80s to today's youth markets. Each group has unique values that drive their behavior, especially their buying behavior. These values are the platforms on which products can be positioned and promotional/sales programs fashioned. Understanding these drivers offers a powerful marketing competitive advantage to those who grasp and execute them.

As a speaker and professor for over 30 years, Dr. Schewe has wowed audiences of all sizes with his engaging and easy style, and with his real-world examples. His decades-long work as a consultant with Fortune 500 companies, including Coca-Cola, Kellogg's, Spalding Sports Worldwide, IBM and Eastman Kodak, provides a fertile inventory of engaging, hard-hitting real-world examples that pepper his presentations and engage his audiences. With the use of attention-getting slides and video clips, Dr. Schewe provides a highly entertaining, yet strongly substantive, talk that shakes up and wakes up audiences to knowledge that helps them develop, strengthen and maintain long-lasting relationships with customers differentiated by age.

And, as an added bonus, audiences always walk away with a better understanding of themselves and their own relationships with parents, children, grandparents and others from other age cohorts.

• Age "Really" Matters: Marketing to Shared Experiences - Individuals are bound together by coming of age over a similar time period. These generational cohorts are highly influenced by the external events experienced between the ages of 17 and 23. After projecting the demographic changes in population and spending power over the next decade, Dr. Schewe contrasts baby boomer values [Indulgent Individualism, Youth, Health, and Questioning Everything] to those of their parents who experienced the Great Depression and World War II [Feeling Achievement in Life, Trust and Security]. With the use of fascinating examples from his consulting engagements, Dr. Schewe provides practical, how-to marketing actions that will keep each cohort buying again and again.
  
  
• Capturing the Hearts, Minds and Pocketbooks of Today's Younger Generational Cohorts - The children of baby boomers, seventy-two million strong, are just now coming of age and evolving their own unique set of cohort values. In this talk, Dr. Schewe compares the values of boomer children with those of their baby boomer parents and with those of Generation X. The differences are dramatic. The impact of the terrorist strike on America is addressed along with the value changes that can be expected from the events of September 11, 2001.
  
  
• Targeting Generational Values to Capture Explosive Response Rates - Today, 57% of all promotion is direct marketing. In this talk, Charlie expands on generational marketing to explain the six generational cohorts that span America's marketplace and identifies their unique core values. And since they can be identified by their chronological age, they provide a strong basis for improved direct response marketing. Examples from Dr. Schewe's direct response consulting engagements provide a real-world overlay to this aspect of successful marketing.
  
  
• Looking at Lifestages: Marketing to Generational Mindsets - Lifestages are the roles one takes on while traveling through life. Each lifestage brings with it a new set of joys and responsibilities, concerns and anxieties. And how lifestages are carried out today are determined by generational cohort values. Parenting of children by baby boomers has been considerably different from that exhibited by their parents. Charlie details the generationally-driven lifestages with insights into how audiences can market to existing and emerging lifestages.