Marketplace: Marketing to Boomers

American Public Media's Marketplace had a feature last Friday morning worth listening to. If you do — how interesting that the last line is one of the major themes of my book. Good to hear that other folks are on the same wavelength. In this instance, it's a professor of television/advertising at Syracuse University.

Boomers Beyond:Marketing to a 50-Plus Audience

This month's feature article in ADVANTAGES, one of the magazines offered by The Advertising Specialty Institute, is Jennifer Zorger's Boomers Beyond: Marketing to a 50-Plus Audience.

Oprah Winfrey ("Queen of the Boomer Demographic") is on the cover. Yours Truly is liberally quoted in the article.

Oprah & Chuck on the same pages.

Hey, I'm the selfless sort. If Oprah's name cozying up to mine will boost her career, I'm glad to help.

Boomer Marketing Basics

Brent Green, marketing/advertising creative director, consultant, and author of Marketing to Leading-Edge Baby Boomers offers this crash course in Boomer Marketing Basics.

An excerpt:

Boomers resonate with marketing messages that help them process their lives. Although they still maintain youthful idealism and verve in many ways, they are now middle-aged adults with middle-aged value frameworks.

Brent calls it the 'cliff notes' version of his book. I think it's more like a script for one of those minute-long versions of famous plays. The characters and dialogue go whizzing by, it's frenetic and fun, but...

Absorb it, get your bearings - then tackle the unexpurgated folio. You'll be thoroughly engrossed and enlightened. (And if you have a consumer product or service, you might even learn how to make a lot more money.)

Marketing to young people is fun!

Bill Virgin, a fellow I read regularly not simply because he's my local newpaper's top business writer — but because he's such a troublemaker — has this to say in today's Seattle P.I.:

Marketing to young people is fun! You get to talk about cool ideas and hot fads and pretend you can actually predict what the next trend will be!

Marketing to old people, by contrast, is boring -- too boring to bother with, except for three inconvenient facts: There are a lot of old people out there. The number of old people is growing. And they're the ones with the money.

No News News

If any of this surprises you.....

Culled from a report by Jupiter Research, Internet Retailer reports Baby Boomers spend more online than other age groups:

37% of online baby boomers who bought products or services on the web said they spent more than $250 in the prior three months. That compares with 32% of online users in all age groups, Jupiter said. 76% of baby boomers have made online purchases of products or services.

Imagine if a company decided to truly target Baby Boomers, if their site was truly boomer-friendly, if Baby Boomer creatives actually designed the site, wrote the copy... imagine how this product or service would break away from the pack...