Bruce Johnston

According to a summary report by Doug Anderson, SVP, Research & Development, The Nielsen Company, growth will be hard to come by in the coming decade and there are “Five Key Trends Other Than Aging” at work which will make growth extremely difficult.  DBJ Associates provides questions wealth advisors may want to ask of themselves in order to benefit from these trends, along with the answer to: “What’d they miss?”

• Growth is found in less-developed world.

By 2030, world population will have grown by around 20%. Only 3.2% of this growth will come from the more developed world.

In the U.S. nearly one in three households will be headed by someone over the age of 65.  Household size will decline across the board with a large share of the population living in one or two person households.  Middle and upper middle classes will shrink the share the most.

How are you positioning your firm to deal with multiple “heads-of-households” living under one roof?  How is your firm preparing to grow in an environment where the traditional source of new customers is shrinking and the power of the decision maker is becoming blurring across multiple generations?

• U.S. based wealth advisors will be locked into market share wars.

The other side of the coin of an aging U.S. population is that the share of households that have children will continue to decline. By the middle 2020s, the share of U.S. households with children under 18 will fall below 30%.  This makes it important that wealth advisory firms create and implement client retention strategy’s that span more than two generation’s today.

With your firm’s future prospect pool guaranteed to drop by 30% what strategies have developed and/or implemented to strengthen relationships with your clients, their siblings and THEIR siblings?   

• Multi-cultural marketing will be essential when selling to families with children.

The majority of population growth in the U.S. will come from new immigrants and the children they have in this country. Since most immigrants are young, families with children will become more ethnic, more quickly, than the total population. By 2025, the majority of families with children in the U.S. will be multi-cultural (Hispanic, Black, Asian, etc.). Less than half of families with children will be native born non-Hispanic White.  Your firm’s future growth potential lies in your ability to appeal to this emerging demographic.

What multi-cultural marketing programs does your firm have in place to appeal to this emerging demographic?  What are your plans for adding bi-lingual advisors to your practice?

• Older Consumers Have New Needs

Baby Boomers will seek to rewrite what it means to be old exactly as they have rewritten what it means to be children and adults. Wealth Advisor’s willing to reach out to Boomers as they age can tap into a large and growing marketplace.  According to Daniel Pink, author of DRIVE, “The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us”, 100 Boomers turn 60 every 15 minutes and they’re all seeking “Purpose” for the rest of their lives.  Wealth advisors not willing to market to persons over the age of 65 will miss out. This is a demographic that research suggests is connected online 98% of the time.

What strategies has your firm put in place to reach this changing Boomer demographic?  What, if any, of the new social media applications has your firm implemented to reach this demographic? 

• As population growth slows in the U.S., so will spending on consumer goods.

Household size will decline across the board and so will consumer spending. The impact of these two trends means that after 2020, per household spending on packaged goods will begin to fall. The current recession is already impacting spending in the short-term. Growth will be very hard to come by both now and in the coming decades.

With fewer dollars available for consumer goods how is your practice positioned to demonstrate why your clients should be spending even closer attention to their financial planning needs?

Social Media is the missing trend.  Those wealth advisors that have an experimental sense of social media’s possibilities will benefit.  There is no locked in blueprint for how to proceed. Social media strategies are a trip through a new frontier. The efforts are flexible, motivational and engaging when done well. And, if you make a mistake, they are pretty easy to correct, unlike the “Five Key Trends Other Than Aging”, they’re case in stone.