Hypothetical Cereal Lineup

The other night I was hanging out with some of my friends from back home in America. It had been a real long time since I had seen any of them, because I have just come back from a four month excursion in Europe. I found out quickly just how easy it is to forget about small things. For instance, the dialog in America versus somewhere in Europe is going to be significantly different. I feel that the reason for this is quite simple. It's all just based on what's current and closest to you.

In France they discussed the French Open, because it was going on while I was there, and it was in France. In Italy they discussed football, because Italy happens to be the Fifa 2006 Champs, and who doesn't enjoy gloating for four years. In Denmark, everyone was just really happy, and enjoyed life because Denmark is the happiest place in the world. This is no joke either, according to BBC News Denmark is in fact the happiest place in the world.

Anyway, the things that social groups banter about is a function of space and time. That is what made me pay close attention to this pretty meaningless discussion that I overheard some buddies of mine having.

My American friends were arguing about the prospects of having a baseball lineup made up completely of cereals. It is quite amusing when you think about it. You have Snap leading off, followed by Tony The Tiger, and of course, Lucky the Leprechaun from Lucky Charms batting cleanup. There are hundreds of cereals to choose from. It's quite amazing how much choice there is in deciding upon cereal.

I thought the idea was quite a laugh. The thing that caught my ear when overhearing this was the fact that baseball was being discussed, and they certainly didn't talk about that in Europe (at least not the people I met).

When I saw my friends around me getting completely engrossed with the concept of a cereal baseball lineup, I asked myself, if my friends find this worthwhile enough to think about, discuss, argue, then surely lots of people would like to think about the same kind of topic.

The problem is, I haven't really nailed down how to get a particular type of product or idea out to people that relate to a cereal baseball lineup. I was thinking that maybe it would be fun to play this as a fantasy game or something, but I'm unsure how you would give points. Then I was thinking that maybe this is an idea that Kellogg's or General Mills would like to have as a promotion on the back of their cereal boxes or as an insert inside of their cereals. But I'm not sure if that really utilizes the idea as best as possible.

If anything, I'd like to hear your ideas as to the practical nature of this concept.

But why even consider the concept unless there is a sizable demographic who would enjoy this sort of debate? Well, after some research, I found out that there are actually a lot of people who would enjoy discussing this.

However, after talking with one of my other friends, he made the comment that the only people who would enjoy debating this issue of a baseball cereal lineup are those who are "high." Whether he was joking or not, I agree with his statement. This is somewhat of a ridiculous conversation to have, so when I found the demographic, I worked those numbers in as well.

• Demographics for Marijuana Smoking, Baseball Liking, Cereal Eating, Debaters

Well, I figure the first place to start is with baseball. The way I determined how many people like baseball is by assuming that those people who attend baseball games in fact enjoy the game. I don't think this is too much of an assumption and anyway a spectator is called a "fan" anyway. According to WikiAnswers, there were 75,959,167 people who attended baseball games in 2006.

This number describes total attendance though, which therefore includes people who have season tickets or attend more than one baseball game in the season. I'll make quite a liberal estimation that 20% of people who attend a baseball game end up attending a second game. So, if we take 80% of 75,959,167 we arrive at the total number of people who enjoy baseball. That equals 60,767,334 people.

Alright great. Next, I need to determine what portion of these people are likely to smoke marijuana. According to US Department of Health and Human Services, 97 million Americans, "admit to having tried [marijuana]." Furthermore, according to the CIA, the estimated population of America in 2007 was 301,139,947. Thus, by taking these two figures, we can make a simple proportion that will describe the percentage of Americans who smoke marijuana, overall. So, 97 million divided by 301,139,947 is equal to 32.2%. I was quite surprised to see how high this percentage actually was.

So, if we assume that our sample of baseball fans are generally similar to the entire US population, we can take 32.2% of the total fans to essentially find out how many baseball fans smoke marijuana. This equation looks like this: 0.322(60,767,334). This function equals 19,573,728 baseball fans that smoke marijuana.

The final step is to determine how many people enjoy eating cereal for breakfast and finally apply this proportion to our prior total to arrive at marijuana smoking, baseball loving, cereal eaters.

According to a survey taken by ABC News on breakfast meals, they were able to determine that 35% of women and 27% of men eat cereal for breakfast. I would think that if these people are eating cereal for breakfast, they must enjoy doing it.

In order to figure out this total, we have to first divide our total baseball fans that smoke marijuana by two (2). This is because we assume that there is an equal amount of men and women in the sample. This means that we have two groups of 9,786,864 baseball fans that smoke marijuana, one male and one female.

If we assume that our cereal eating survey is generally representative of America, we apply the percentages to the two groups to arrive at our final conclusions.

• 0.35(9,786,864 females) = 3,425,402 cereal eating females that like baseball and smoke marijuana
• 0.27(9,786,864 males) = 2,642,453 cereal eating males that like baseball and smoke marijuana

This gives us a grand total of 6,067,855 cereal eaters that like baseball and smoke marijuana.

• Conclusion

Based on these findings, the potential demographic for a product that utilizes baseball and cereal in this particular context (one conducive to a person who smokes marijuana), is approximately 6 million people.

That's a significant total when you consider how random these three cross sections of America are. After performing these calculations, it further motivates me to find the next great idea, because, apparently, no matter what it is...there's a market for it.