We’ve been talking about the drone movement for quite a while now—but exactly how popular are drones, anyway?
It’s a “young person” thing
According to a statistic from Global Web Index, 36 percent of people 16-34 years old show interest in using drones; the 35-44 group drops to 33 percent, the 45-54 group drops again to 25 percent, and the 55-64 group hovers at around 19 percent.
It also seems as though males hold significantly more interest in future drone usage, with their whopping 38 percent trumping female interest (25 percent).
Too techy?
The numbers make sense, of course. Not to generalize too harshly, but your average 55-and-up isn’t participating in extreme sports while a GoPro-toting drone follows, nor are they investigating skyscraper rooftops on a freelance basis. Drones are patently “young person” things; much like iPhones and laptops, they are often considered too technical for the retiring generation.
Then again—much like iPhones and laptops—the technology is too useful to ignore, even for tech snobs.
My partner’s father uses a drone in agriculture to autonomously check on his crops and, occasionally, create promotional material. He’s certainly over the 55-year-old drop-off mark, as are most of his counterparts in the area; yet, when they see the ease with which he does his job, they can’t help but want a piece of the drone action.
A disinterested demographic
Like anything else, marketing drones to the 55 and up crowd is going to be much less about the “wow” factor of your average drone and much more about what it can do to make their lives easier. Agriculture is an easy field to appeal to, as is real estate; other potential areas of interest could easily include automobile sales or admissions services at universities.
Similarly, since a fair amount of drone-related entrepreneurship is based around aerial photography, consider approaching marketing from a cost-effective angle: when one considers the sheer cost of hiring a specialist for one shoot, paying a bit more for a personal drone doesn’t seem so bad.
The VR tech of flying things
And, of course, as drones become more commonplace, so will the desire to own them. Just wait; formerly-disinterested consumers will be lining up to purchase theirs soon enough.
#Drones
