Top 10 misconceptions that sabotage marketing to mature audiences – #4

November 17th, 2009 by Robbie Magee

It’s easy to understand age groups when you classify and think of them in terms of conventional, linear life stages…newborns, toddlers, kindergartners, grammar-schoolers, tweens, teens, high-schoolers, college kids, and so forth.

But what happens once we complete the mandatory sequence of our early development and disperse into an infinite combination of later life stages? We’re challenged here by the word “combination.”  It’s nearly impossible for a toddler to simultaneously be a high schooler, or a newborn a kindergartner.  But, as we age, we can—and do—transcend multiple life stages. How, then, can we as communicators possibly relate to people we can’t accurately peg on the life -stage path?  First, we have to abandon the following belief:

#4: Old age is a fixed point on the horizon.

Life is no longer linear to older adults—it’s cyclical. We don’t follow in our parents’ footsteps.  Long gone are the days when we went to school, started a job only to end up staying at the same company for 40 years, got married and had kids, retired, and moved to Florida.

More often than not, adult lives now go something like this: go to school, find a job, get married, have kids, get divorced, remarry, have more kids with the new spouse, find a new job, become a caregiver, downsize, relocate, go back to school, start a new career, and so forth.

The implications here?  No matter what “generation” we belong to, our lives now have more commonality than ever before.  Advertisers should consider how this can actually open and expand potential lines of communications. While we’re at it, let’s also abandon the “retirement” stereotype. The vast majority (approximately 90%) of people over 50 say they plan to work after the age of 65.  Not only are they living longer and have the ability, but they also have the need largely due to diminished traditional retirement “provisions” such as Social Security and pensions.

But the upside to remaining in the workforce longer is that the limitations of living on a fixed income will be less dramatic, as older adults will continue to spend money on work clothes, be able to afford to travel regularly and dine out, and continue to participate in hobbies and sports.  In short, people who continue to work well into their sixties and beyond will continue to share many of the same buying behaviors as younger people.

Whether we consider this to be a merging of generations or a slow down of the aging process, it demonstrates the importance of not making assumptions about attitudes and abilities based on how previous generations have aged. Today, adults over 50 are clearly more “forward-looking” than their parents were. In some ways, they may think more like their kids do than their parents did.

For marketers who are “fearful that marketing to Boomers means an entirely new, additional effort and budget,” consider the perspective of The Boomer Project, which cited the recent re-release of the Beatles anthology as a reminder that “the trick is to develop programs that cut across everyone, including Boomers.”

- Robbie Magee

This entry was posted by Robbie Magee on Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 and is filed under Brand Strategy, MF, Marketing, Mature Market, Senior Marketing, Success. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.