What is happening to American households?

I reckon marketers focus too much of their attention on the stats about consumer numbers and types and not enough about what is happening with households.

There are some interesting insights in the new Nielsen report: The New Digital American Family: Understanding family dynamics, media and purchasing behavior trends.

Households with young children are now history. Well not exactly history but fast contracting. The family marketplace is just 33.6%.

But there is something else happening. The family household is becoming less homogeneous, less educated and less affluent target audience.

By the mid-2030s, the share of households with children is expected to decline further to between 25-30%. The family household is not going to look like it does today due to the ferocious projected growth of multi-cultural households.

Nielsen projections suggest that the majority of families with children will be multi-cultural before the end of this decade. Fewer than half will be native-born, non-Hispanic white. Families with children already register more than 40% multi-cultural. The proportion is even higher at 47% among those families with a head of household age 33 or younger and soars to 61% for the lowest income families.

The UK is not that much different. Already one in four babies are born to a foreign mother, a rise of 11% since 1998. Foreign children will outnumber indigenous children in Britain by 2021.


I didn’t say anything about the largest group of US households. You can work out the implication that has for marketers for yourself. Dick Stroud