Barron’s Weighs In

Gene Epstein, Economics Editor at Barron’s, has a cover story (subscription required) and video all about what yours truly and others have been screaming about for years:

Boomer Consumer 
Companies that continue to ignore the over-50 set do so at their peril, as "boomer consumers" eat up a larger slice of the nation's spending pie.

Increasingly, the 77 million of them are being ignored by advertisers and marketers. They're being elbowed aside, ironically, by 18-to-49-year-olds, the very age group that they, in their younger years, put on the map as the most desirable consumer cohort. But the realities are changing, and any company that ignores them will be doing so at its peril over the next decade or two.

Here’s the pull quote from the cover of my book, first edition published in early 2005:

“It will be the Baby Boomers who will be the first to pick and choose, to ignore or be seduced by leading-edge technology marketing. There’s a simple reason for this. We have the money to buy this stuff. Experts say we’ll continue to have the money for at least the next twenty years. Write us off at your own peril.

And there’s a whole chapter about “Being elbowed aside, ironically, by 18-to-49-year-olds, the very age group that they, in their younger years, put on the map as the most desirable consumer cohort.”  Pulled from the chapter:

Partly to save their hides, ad agencies turned their creative departments over to twenty-somethings. The sheer size of Baby Boomers made them the market—composed of scores of unwieldy cohorts. By attrition, this would have occurred naturally. It just happened ten or fifteen years sooner than with previous generations coming of age.

Barely out of college, Baby Boomers were in control of marketing and advertising to themselves—and became successful at it. After all, we knew the market.

The Barron’s story and video also covers subjects discussed numerous times in my blog:

Boomer Backlash II

The Backlash: If every time someone over fifty sees a commercial targeting them and it’s always for an age-related product or service, pretty soon their eyes will glaze over, they’ll get itchy and grumpy.

The Real Issue: Marketing and advertising folks grasping the fact that Boomers will be buying billions (trillions?) of dollars worth of non-age related products for the next twenty-odd years. If you target this group for toothpaste, computers, clothes, food, nail polish, sporting equipment, toenail clippers - anything at all (almost), and you do it with respect and finesse, they will appreciate and consider your product.

Another pull from the Barron’s article:

… A disproportionately large number of advertising copywriters, account managers and art directors are young. "Ask them to do an ad targeting the 50-plus demographic, and they default to a gray-haired senior limping down a beach trailed by an aging golden retriever," he adds.

That’s my book. Read a review:

Advertising to Baby Boomers
Chuck Nyren
by Joyce M. Wolburg, Journal of Consumer Marketing
I thought it was just me, but after reading Advertising to Baby Boomers, I now put the blame squarely where it belongs – on the copywriters. Most are Gen-Xers or members of Gen Y, who understand very well how to communicate with their own cohorts, but often fail to resonate with Baby Boomers.

More reviews.

And this blog post.

So … not much new from Barron’s for me or my readers, but certainly worth passing along:

Related Post from 2007:
Barron's "Geezer Power"

Update: Smart Money is now running the complete article.

Baby Boomers and The Kindle

A post from May 2009:

Not About The Kindle Controversy
I don’t want to get into a brouhaha over Amazon’s Kindle and whether it’s a swindle or a savior or Beelzebub.  (Although the talking version seems to need elocution lessons.)

Multimedia Journalist Lauren E. Bohn did some research (including calling yours truly) and put together a trenchant piece:

Kindling a reading revolution among baby boomers?  Baby boomers leading the perceived revolution
Berdell, a baby boomer, said he feels “hip” for owning a digital counterpart to the better portion of his library. He doesn’t bemoan the diminishing smell of paper and glue in his office.  He’s not alone.

I don’t see books disappearing. They’re easier to read (and skim) than an electronic device.   

And as one of Lauren’s interviewees says:

People can ingest content in more than one way …

The Google Phone

Here’s a campaign that (I guess) is age-neutral, maybe skewed a bit to Baby Boomers (two out of three celebrities, and a moldy tune for the TV spot)*:

I’m not a fan of using celebrities for ads, although there are exceptions.  I generally smile when I see Whoopi. 

Fast Company’s Chris Dannen says, “The Google Phone's Ad Campaign Bites, Here's How to Give It Teeth.”

The TV spot is aspirational, direct, fun – but it doesn’t do what it should do:

For the umpteenth time …
The Most Effective Marketing/Advertising Model For Reaching Baby Boomers: What is now called traditional advertising pushing you to an age-friendly, informative product/services web site.

It’s not a bad site.

And that hand-me-down soundtrack does everything a soundtrack shouldn’t.  I’ll admit that I’d hoped to never hear that recording again – but even if you liked it way back when, it still doesn’t work:

Purely anecdotal: I’m watching TV. I hear a tune I haven’t heard in thirty-five, forty years. My mind goes off into the ether. “Wow. What a great song. I’d forgotten all about it. I had the album. The cover was blue . . . And there were a bunch of other great songs on that album. What the hell were they? I can’t remember . . . I wonder if I can get it on Amazon. There’s probably only a compilation of his hits, or a boxed set. But I just want the CD of the album. I’ll have to remember to check the next time I’m online ..”

By then, the commercial is over. In fact, probably three other commercials are over. I have no idea what the product is, or what any of the other products are.

But the real questions are these: Do advertisers benefit from invoking the past willy-nilly? When those tunes come on, am I really paying attention? Or do they send me off into the ether, conjuring up all sorts of bizarre and moldy feelings, images, remembrances?

If someone at Google or T-Mobile or their ad agency liked this tune so much, spend some money and redo the ditty, so it sounds relevant for today. When I hear that recording while watching the commercial, I think I should be picking up this:

More: Invoking The Sixties

* Thanks to Fast Company for the graphic.

Advertisers: Be Prepared For Big Boomer Brains

I was looking forward to less pain in the future, hoping the gradual wearing away of gray matter would take a load off my nagging neck. Now I hear otherwise:

Older Brains May Not Be So Small After All Decrease in gray matter isn't a given, researchers find
Scientists have assumed that people's brains shrink as they age, but researchers now suspect that's not the case … Scientists in the past had failed to screen out people whose brains had shrunk because of brain disease, they said.

In other words, simply growing older may not make the brain become smaller.

That’s great. That’s all I need. A fully-functioning, fat, juicy noggin and an arthritic neck that can barely hold it up.

Other bad news (especially for advertisers who continue to patronize and dismiss anybody over fifty):

Older Brain May Really Be a Wiser Brain

Baby Boomers are smarter than you think.

And generally better.

Late Bloomer Boomers

In the NYT yesterday:

The Summer of the Celebrity Deaths?
By SARAH KERSHAW
This summer could come to be known as the summer when baby boomers began to turn to the obituary pages first, to face not merely their own mortality or ponder their legacies, but to witness the passing of legends who defined them as a tribe, bequeathing through music, culture, news and politics a kind of generational badge that has begun to fray.

“This is a historical development in cultural history,” said Todd Gitlin, 66, the sociologist and author of “The Sixties,” who teaches at the Columbia University School of Journalism. “It’s the ebbing of figures who have a wide enough span of appreciation and admiration so they appeal to significant numbers of people, like incarnations of virtue. So people take a new measure of themselves when they ask, ‘Will there ever be anybody else like X’ ”?

The shinier side:

Going by actuarial tables, the boomers, now age 45 to 63, can expect to live to age 83, thanks to modern health care …

“I think this is the first time so many have simultaneously had an awareness of death and the prospect of a whole new act,” Mr. (Marc) Freedman said. “Never before have there been so many people who have so much experience and the time left to do something with it.”

I talked about this in my book (©2005, 2007).  A chunk of it:

The Late Bloomer Boomers

I don’t think that you should become a copywriter until you’ve done something else first . . . I wrote my first ad when I was 39 . . . I couldn’t have done it unless I had done a lot of other things first . . . I had experience that was enormously important when I sat down to write my first ad. 
                                                      —David Ogilvy1

One of the ways Baby Boomers are redefining middle age is by beginning new lives.This is nothing that hasn’t been done before, but for a large chunk of a generation to do it practically en masse took many prognosticators by surprise.

When Baby Boomers were in their late teens through their early thirties there was an explosion of creative productivity in all fields.

Now Boomers in their late forties and fifties, the ones who didn’t quite “make it” or took safer paths, are finding out that their creative juices never dried up. Many of these folks are writing fiction and non-fiction, becoming graphic artists and photographers, and playing and composing music. And just as many are doing astonishingly creative things in the business world, often as entrepreneurs.

This isn’t like retired people taking on hobbies. The Late Bloomer Boomer Movement is going full blast, and there’s no stopping it. The magic equation: Thirty-odd years of experience plus not feeling old and being relatively healthy plus knowing you have another quarter-century of productivity in you equals . . .

Well, we’ll see. Some pundits are predicting that Late Bloomer Boomers may leave a bigger imprint on society than the “early bloomer” Boomers who were at the top of their games twenty-five to thirty-five years ago.
____

1 Denis Higgins, The Art of Writing Advertising (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003).