A Dwelling Deluge

At least in the press, both print and pixel:

Retiring Baby Boomers Create Housing Boomtowns
by Shanthi Bharatwaj
Baby boomers -- those born between 1946 and 1964, constituting roughly 75 million people -- are retiring in increasing numbers, prompting a new cycle of growth…

Introducing the retirement commune
When it comes to living arrangements, boomers are determined to get by with a little help from their friends.
By Sally Abrahms

Baby boomers' mobile-home paradise
By Lisa Margonelli
Few people aspire to be old or to live in a trailer, but we need to be more open to the possibilities inherent in both…

New Clark Retirement CEO focuses on Baby Boomers
By Charlsie Dewey
Brian Pangle, the new president and CEO of Clark Retirement Community, considers himself to be on the tail-end of the baby boomer generation, and he said he knows members of his generation hope to live as independently as possible for as long as possible.

Minnesota targets baby boomers with specialist housing options
By Jane A Peterson
Across America, providers of housing and services for older people are gearing up for… those 78 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964.

The downpour continues:

New Canfield development caters to baby boomers
By Jamison Cocklin
… At a time when new home construction has only just started to ramp back up in the Mahoning Valley and appraisals finally are on the rise, word of the Abbey Road Villas is spreading — but it isn’t just the market stoking demand.

One clue is in the name. Recall that Abbey Road was the final album The Beatles recorded in 1969…

New Bergen County handyman franchise caters to Baby Boomers
by Myles Ma
Keith Paul helped found HandyPro in 1996 when he said a contractor ripped off an elderly relative.

"We started the company just helping out seniors," Paul said. As it turns out, seniors are a fast-growing customer base.

I left out a few.  I didn’t want you to drown.

The point of this gathering: These unwieldy folks are not going quietly and peacefully into middle-to-old age. They are going to insist on choices for housing. One size won’t fit all.  The only through-line might be (probably should be) elements of Universal Design.

I wrote about it all in my book ©2005, 2007. An excerpt (PDF):

Selling Universal Design To Baby Boomers/Aging In Place
… Past generations tended to get excited about modern conveniences that would make their lives easier. They'd walk into a planned housing unit and exclaim, "Look! It's got this and this and this and this!" The more features, the better. The more 'planned,' the better. It was time to start a new life. Time to be rewarded for all the hard work, and relax.

Not so with Baby Boomers. We take most modern conveniences for granted. And we don't want to start new lives, but continue the lives we already have.

Baby Boomers will be anticipating a seamless transition. Instead of "Look! It has this and this and this," we'll be sniffing around for friendly, useful spaces. You'll want us to say, "Look! There's a perfect place for my pottery wheel," or "There are plenty of windows and sunlight. My house plants and indoor herb garden will do fine in here," or "Good. I can put up big, deep shelves for my books and CDs," or "Here's the perfect room for our side business on Ebay," or "Here's a place where I can soundproof a recording studio or entertainment center," or "This oversized back door is great because I can roll my bicycle in and out without squeezing and jerking it around - and the extra-wide hallway means there's plenty of room so I can just lean it against the wall and we won't bang into it every time we walk past it."

A collection of posts and links (2005-2013):

Aging In Place & Universal Design

Nielsen Leftovers

Nothing fresh from Nielsen, but I’ll warm it up so we can have a bland snack:

The Me Generation Meets Generation Me
From their money to their media, Boomers and Millennials exhibit vastly different behaviors and habits…Understanding how to reach these consumers and capture their hearts with appropriate creative is crucial.

The Me Gen/Gen Me stuff is silly:

22 October 2009
Me vs. We Redux Redux
From my book ©2005:

Today, Baby Boomers are two or three times removed from being a “me” generation. What constitutes self-actualization when you are twenty-five is different than when you are fifty-five. In your twenties a person thinks they are the picture. As you get older, you see yourself more and more as a picture that is part of a bigger picture.

Talk to some folks in their twenties, thirties. They are now in that ‘me’ stage. It’s healthy, smart for them to be so. I was just like them thirty years ago, get a big bang out of them, admire their boundless creativity, energy – and self-obsession. These ‘me generation’ twentysomethings today will become a ‘we generation’ in thirty years.

Nielsen:

The aging brain is more easily distracted—as the brain ages it slowly loses the ability to suppress distraction.

Sounds familiar:

30 November 2008
Brains More Distracted, Not Slower with Age

Nielsen:

Contrast is the preference vs. color for online ads.

Online and any ads – television, print, outdoor.  As Nielsen implies, these ‘insights’ have less to do with generational differences and more to do with youth/aging bodies and brains.

Remember: We were young once – and wallowed in graphic and auditory noise. 

Nielsen:

… Boomers prefer clever, light-hearted humor (rather than mean-spirited) and relatable characters who are Boomers themselves or not much younger. The tone should be positive—avoiding words like “don’t.” For Boomer males, clever wit and calm dialogue-driven storylines work. For Boomer females, family-friendly humor and sentimental themes resonate best.

I’d agree with that.  In fact, my book is all about that.  I likewise agreed with it a few years ago:

16 September 2009
Boomer Backlash II

Click that link above, for there’s a downside to all this.

More posts about advertising and the Boomer brain:

Human Resources/Brain Power

Windows 8 Redux

NostraChuckus, Renowned Seer of The Mundane and The Obvious, has startled the world again with his pedestrian prognostications:

01 January 2013
Windows 8
… Win 8 phones, tablets, and desktops are potent technologies for Baby Boomers, but you’d never know it by the ads and commercials.  The products are positioned as toys, not elegant and productive tools:

Win 8

Microsoft would be wise to fashion some advertising  for Boomers and older (and that tiny niche market known as the business industry).  Less flash, more substance.

Three months later:

Win 8

Less talk, more doing

Now is the time for business to get onboard.

Are you model material?

From Rebecca Nappi of The Spokesman Review:

Are you model material?
Advertisers see growing markets for boomers in fashion, acting
… Boomer age men and women will be in greater demand in the next few years as models and actors in TV commercials, as companies finally wake up to the fact that boomers have some money to spend, a lot more, in fact, than the 20-something folks advertisers are so hot after.

I’ve been bellowing about this for years:

08 February 2007
Best Commercial Not On The Superbowl

02 July 2008
Demand for older models grows

09 January 2009
Chico’s and Younger Women
… Colleague and intrepid blogger/marketer Brent Green recently posted about Chico’s and their catalog.

17 February 2009
The list goes on and on…
Lina Ko of Boomerwatch.ca rounds up examples of mature women in campaigns.

27 May 2009
The Forgotten Market Online
Christina Binkley of The Wall Street Journal is all over the paucity of online shopping for 35+ (that’s age, not size) apparel for women.

Sounds great. But what concerns me: Advertisers might think that simply throwing in Boomer models will sell a product or service to Boomers. 

More important than merely models:

05 November 2006
Ignore the Research and Trust Your Gut
… It wouldn't be too bright to trust my gut to come up with a campaign for a product aimed at twentysomethings. My gut would tell me, "… Ummm ... ummm ... Wait! I got it! We get some twentysomething girl an' spike her hair an' give'er tattoos and a nose ring an' put an iPod on her head an' bed some hip-hop music an' have her hold up the toothpaste! Yeah! They'll buy it! They'll buy it!"

And this:

16 September 2009
Boomer Backlash II
…It’s going to be up to companies to be proactive when dealing with advertising agencies. Quality control of your product doesn’t stop at the entrances of Madison Avenue’s finest, or at the doors of small local or regional advertising agencies. If companies put pressure on agencies, and demand 45-plus creatives for products aimed at the 45-plus market, then they will find out that Baby Boomers are still “the single most vibrant and exciting consumer group in the world.”

New Editor-in-Chief at AARP Magazine

A blog post collection from a few months ago:

AARP Is All New Redux
AARP is ‘rebranding’ itself for the umpteenth time ...

One of those posts:

02 April 2013
AARP Is All New Redux: Part III (The Magazine)
There is a slow overhaul of AARP Magazine going on, no doubt for the better ... Myrna Blyth, former editor/publisher of a slew of top-notch magazines (Ladies’ Home Journal, Family Circle, More, and even more) is now Editorial Director of AARP Media.  AARP can’t do much better than that.

Now there’s news about the overhaul of AARP Magazine:

Bob Love Named AARP Editor-in-Chief
Monday, June 10, 2013
Steve Cohn
Robert ("Bob") Love, whose 20 years at Rolling Stone culminated in leading the biweekly to two National Magazine Awards while managing editor from 1998-2002, was hired June 4 as AARP editor-in-chief. Upon his June 24 start, Love will oversee all editorial content creation and management for the bimonthly AARP, which goes to 22.7 million members of the namesake organization originally formed to serve retirees…During his career, he has worked with such distinguished writers as T.C. Boyle, P.J. O'Rourke, Scott Turow and the late Hunter S. Thompson.

Looks like chunks of the magazine might become relevant, irreverent, entertaining.

 

 

P.S.  That NostraChuckus is pretty good, ain’t he?