A Time of Magic

Not just individually, but as a world population. The average age of the world’s population is motoring upwards as the baby boom move on into old age.

Most depressing is the ageing of the advertisements though. Gradually increasing in number are those targeted at old people. Things like www.msmcream.net which a few years ago nobody would have even heard of, never mind have seen any kind of advertising for it. Gradually dropping are the sexier adverts aimed at younger (and “younger” means under 50 these days) people. They’re even looking for older models which has to be the most depressing aspect of it: do we really want to have oldies on the cover of Cosmo et al?

Hopefully at some stage the marketing departments will wise up and realise that the oldie ads are putting us off.

Marketing hype can add a LOT to the price of any product if it’s done right.

Probably the best example of that at the moment is the iPad. The much more capable Android machines are coming in at little more than half the price for no reason other than the marketing spend of Apple to explain that difference. Is it really worth another £200 for that iPad logo?

Similar price differences can crop even with the likes of acne cream. There’s a surprising number of teenagers who’ll pay massively over the odds for a particular logo, regardless of whether the product is better or not.

As Christmas approaches, parents everywhere will be trawling the shops for toys.

Usually, they’ll hit the big toy shops and so be presented with an identical range of toys to choose from as all the other parents. These days the supermarkets will have a reasonable selection and, usually, with lower prices than those in the specialist toy shops.

However, for something a little different I find that it’s always worth having a look round Maplins which is a specialist electronics store. Now, 99% of the stuff is electronics components but for various reasons they always have a substantial number of toys too and ones that you’ll usually not see elsewhere. For example, the remote control hovercraft of last Christmas was there and there’s always a range of surprisingly cheap remote control cars. In fact, for remote control toys it seems to always be the place to go. At the moment, it’s the only place I’ve seen remote control diggers, tanks and assorted sizes of cars ranging from one inch models through to things that would be almost large enough for our little guy to ride on.