Geographic Shifts in Population
This is a period of great migratory movements between and within countries. Americans, for example, are a mobile people, with about 14 percent of all U.S. residents moving each year. Over the past two decades, the U.S. population has shifted. The West and South have grown, whereas the Midwest and Northeast states have lost population.22 Such population shifts interest marketers because people in different regions buy differently. For example, research shows that people in Seattle buy more toothbrushes per capita than people in any other U.S. city; people in Salt Lake City eat more candy bars; and people in Miami drink more prune juice.
Also, for more than a century, Americans have been moving from rural to metropolitan areas. In the 1950s, they made a massive exit from the cities to the suburbs. Today, the migration to the suburbs continues. And more and more Americans are moving to "micropolitan areas," small cities located beyond congested metropolitan areas. Drawing refugees from rural and suburban America, these smaller micros offer many of the advantages of metro areas—jobs, restaurants, diversions, community organizations—but without the population crush, traffic jams, high crime rates, and high property taxes often associated with heavily urbanized areas.23
The shift in where people live has also caused a shift in where they work. For example,
the migration toward micropolitan and suburban areas has resulted in a rapid increase in the number of people who "telecommute"—work at home or in a remote office and conduct their business by phone, fax, modem, or the Internet. This trend, in turn, has created a booming SOHO (small office/home office) market. An estimated 10 percent of today's workforce works from home with the help of electronic conveniences such as PCs, cell phones, fax machines, PDA devices, and fast Internet access. And a recent study estimates that two million American businesses support some kind of telecommuting program.24
Many marketers are actively courting the lucrative telecommuting market. A For example, WebEx, the Web-conferencing division of Cisco, the company that dominates the world market for IP-based networking equipment, helps overcome the isolation that often accompanies telecommuting. With WebEx, people can meet and collaborate online, no matter what their work location. "All you need to run effective online meetings is a browser and a phone," says the company. With WebEx, people working anywhere can interact with other individuals or small groups to make presentations, exchange documents, and share desktops, complete with audio and full-motion video. WebEx's
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Cisco targets the growing telecommuter market with WebEx, which lets people meet and collaborate online, no matter what their work location.
MeetMeNow service can be launched from desktops, Microsoft Outlook and Office, and instant messaging clients such as Yahoo! Messenger and MSN Messenger. MeetMeNow automatically finds and configures users' Webcams and lets meeting hosts switch among participants' video streams to form a virtual roundtable. More than 2.2 million participate in WebEx sessions every day.25
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