Birth, Death and the Toy Industry

“Deaths Exceed Births in Increasing Number of Major US Cities.” That was the headline on the LifeSiteNews.com website that grabbed my eye. They weren’t the only ones noting the shift. Here is what the New York Times had to say:

"What demographers call a natural decrease has been occurring for years in tiny rural towns and in some retirement meccas in the South. But the phenomenon is relatively new in metropolitan areas in the Northeast, the Rust Belt of the Middle West and Appalachia. Hospitals are closing obstetrics wards and converting them to acute care. Local governments and other social service providers are adjusting to the emergence of entire neighborhoods where the average age is soaring…  In Pittsburgh, public school enrollment plummeted from about 70,000 two decades ago to about 30,000 and continues shrinking by about 1,000 a year."

That’s not all. According to the June 8, 2008 About.com, the U.S. birth rate has been in decline for the last twelve years. According to the article, “[t]he birth rate fell to 13.9 per 1,000 persons in 2002, down from 14.1 per 1,000 in 2001 and down a full 17 percent from the recent peak in 1990 (16.7 per 1,000), according to a new CDC report…CDC analysts say the birth rate is dropping as the increasing life span of Americans results in a smaller proportion of women of child childbearing age.”

So, not only do we have challenges but we have challenges within challenges. How do we develop and execute marketing plans for a nation in which, not only is there a shrinking base of children but that some parts of the country will have far more children than other parts of the country.

It even gets more complicated when you look at who is having babies. I will look at that in my next blog.