Marketers should consider employment status when allocating resources for targeting consumers. Full time employees make as many daily contacts as part time employees and stayathomers combined! A consumer package goods manufacturer might consider sampling its products in or near their targeted consumers’ workplace rather than, or in addition to, traditional inhome sampling. For purposes of the study, “contact” was defined as “any type of direct communication a person has with another person including spoken to inperson, by phone, or written via email, or instanttext message.” Stayathomers tend to make more daily visits to chat rooms, message boards, free email services, forums, and any information station they can easily find. Including web site addresses and promotion codes in marketing efforts, making it easy to pass this information along online, is a tactic that works well with this group of people provided there is perceived value. Marketers often use household income of 75,000 as an affluence threshold but there was no apparent increase in word of mouth or (WOM) activity for people with incomes from 75,000 to 90,000. The results showed acceleration in WOM likelihood for households earning 100,000 or more. As expected, technology has a significant influence on how different generations foster WOM. Here’s a glimpse into the future, as well as today. Younger generations are creating personal online media to a greater extent, with nearly half (49) of Gen Y having built a website and one quarter having their own blog. When reaching out to their peers, onequarter visit chat rooms or message boards daily and 17 of their contact activity is done through instant or text messaging. Gen X and Boomers tend to use email more often and are more likely to spread positive WOM. These groups are ripe for viral email campaigns. An overlooked and interesting area for marketers is reaching Silver Birds through message boards and chat rooms. They have more activity in those areas than Boomers and nearly equal activity to Gen X. This is likely due to their desire to reconnect with family and friends, and to discuss health, medical, and other issues of aging with peers and professionals. At this time of their life they tend to go on cruises, flights, and lots of different locations all over the world, since most of them worked all their life and now have the time and most have the cash to do these types of travel.

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The team created a bike for the Oregon Manifest 2011 Constructor's Design Challenge, a bike building competition pitting three teams of designers and handcrafted bike builders. The Ideo-Rock Lobster bike no doubt had the most conventional look of the three bikes in the design collaboration category. On Saturday, the teams, along with another 34 bike builders battling in a separate competition, put their final creations through a rigorous field test, riding 51 miles over pavement and gravel roads, climbing 3,371 feet over the course on bikes... This summer, CNET visited with the three teams--including the pairing of Portland design firm Ziba with Portland bike builder Signal Cycles, and the tandem of San Francisco design consultancy Fuseproject with Santa Rosa SyCip Designs-- as they... , bike builder Rock Lobster Custom Cycles may have pushed the industry a step closer to achieving the goal. --For years, the cycling industry has wrestled with creating a bike convenient enough for the masses. Their goal: create the best utility bike for urban living.

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