Brent Green In addition to writing this blog about Boomer consumers, I am a marketing consultant and author of "Marketing to Leading-Edge Baby Boomers: Perceptions, Principles, Practices, Predictions."
I present workshops and give speeches about the Boomer generation and business strategies. Further, and as you will discover in this Boomer blog, I provide opinions, analyses and commentary for news media such as "The Los Angeles Times," "US News & World Report," "Business Week," "Ad Age," and "The Wall Street Journal."
My company, Brent Green & Associates, Inc., is an internationally award-winning firm specializing in direct response marketing for health & fitness and Boomer-focused companies.
Marketing to Boomers
I welcome your comments and questions here. Please enjoy my blog commentary, which usually slides precariously on thin ice.
Media relations, media interviewing, public speaking, and leadership training for senior executives provided by veterans in PR and news reporting
Discover the future with Brent Green's new book, "Generation Reinvention: How Boomers Today Are Changing Business, Marketing, Aging and The Future."
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IMMN is a professional organization for executives interested in marketing to the 40+ demographic. The organization, of which Brent Green is an honorary advisory board member, has affiliate marketing organizations worldwide, including in the UK, New Zealand and Australia.
Internationally award-winning direct response marketing for Boomer-focused companies
Sustainable Business Group, a consulting company comprised of leading multi-disciplinary experts, helps for-profit and nonprofit organizations wisely develop and deploy human, knowledge and physical resources for the long term.
Brent Green & Associates is a leading marketing company with specialized expertise in selling products and services to the Boomer male market, comprised of over 35 million U.S. adults. Click here to visit our website.
Lee Eisenberg Lee Eisenberg is the author of "The Number," a title metaphorically representing the amount of resources people will need to enjoy the active life they desire, especially post-career. Backed by visionary advice from the former Editor-in-Chief of "Esquire Magazine," Eisenberg urges people to assume control and responsibility for their standard of living. This is an important resource for companies and advisors helping Boomers prepare for their post-career lives.
Kim Walker Kim Walker is a respected veteran of the communications industry in Asia Pacific, with 30 years of business and marketing leadership experience in Australia, Hong Kong, Tokyo and New York. His newest venture is SILVER, the only marketing and business consultancy focused on the 50+ market in Asia Pacific. He has been a business trends and market identifier who had launched three pioneer-status businesses to exploit opportunities unveiled by his observations.
Hiroyuki Murata Hiroyuki Murata (Hiro) is a well-known expert on the 50+ market and an opinion leader on aging issues in Japan and internationally. Among his noteworthy accomplishments, Murata introduced Curves, the world’s largest fitness chain for women, to Japan and helped make it a successful business. He is also responsible for bringing the first college-linked retirement community to Japan, which opened in Kobe in August 2008.
Hiro is the author of several books, including "The Business of Aging: 10 Successful Strategies for a Diverse Market" and "Seven Paradigm Shifts in Thinking about the Business of Aging." They have been described as “must read books” by more than 30 leading publications including Nikkei, Nikkei Business, Yomiuri, and Japan Industry News. His most recent book, "Retirement Moratorium: What Will the Not-Retired Boomers Change?" was published in August 2007 by Nikkei Publishing.
Hiro serves as President of The Social Development Research Center, Tokyo, a think-tank overseen by METI (Ministry of Economy, Technology, and Industry) as well as Board members and Advisors to various Japanese private companies. He also serves as a Visiting Professor of Kansai University and as a member of Advisory Boards of The World Demographic Association (Switzerland) and ThirdAge, Inc. (U.S.).
Generation Jones Jonathan Pontell is the founder and ardent advocate for Generation Jones, the "lost" generation between Baby Boomers and Generation X. Although this group has traditionally been lumped with Boomers, Pontell makes a powerful case to redefine this cohort as distinct from the Baby Boomer Generation.
The aged man struggled to get out of his recliner. His leg muscles could not lift his weight into a vertical position, so he fell back into the chair, exhausted. He sat there for a few minutes, trying to command his weak muscles to help him stand. He barely had strength to push upwards with his hands against armrests.
Finally in a single determined push with arms and forward momentum from rocking, he stood, though unsteadily. It took a few seconds for him to find his balance so he could then shuffle from his recliner to reach the bathroom. There he would need to sit again, and he knew that leaving the stool would be equally arduous — maybe impossible. How he dreaded the idea of becoming immobilized and unable to escape the prison of sitting.
One morbid challenge confronting Boomers as they age many not ring familiar to you. But when you think about it, you might consider aging from a different perspective. Called sarcopenia, this challenge involves muscle wasting due to aging.
Sarcopenia derives from the Latin roots, "sarco" for muscle, and "penia" for wasting, making it a “muscle wasting disease.” Sarcopenia is a byproduct of the aging process, the progressive loss of muscle fiber that begins in middle age. The process starts in our 30s but, unchecked, leads to rapid deterioration in strength and endurance in the mid-60s. Without intervention, adults can lose as much as 8% of muscle mass every ten years.
Sarcopenia propels a cascade of other medical problems. Less muscle mass and strength leads to faster fatigue. Chronic fatigue leads to less physical activity and a more sedentary lifestyle. Less activity results in fat gain and obesity. Excess weight contributes to glucose intolerance, type II diabetes and a condition called metabolic syndrome. This syndrome can then cause hypertension and increasing risk for cardiovascular disease. The end-state of sarcopenia is death.
Muscle wasting contributes dramatically to eldercare costs. Once older patients become incapable of the activities of daily living, such as rising unassisted from a recliner, they are usually institutionalized in nursing homes and assisted living facilities where most remain until death.
I recently participated in an Innovators Summit: “a unique forum where leaders representing a variety of sectors join together to design new business models, network about possibilities, and spawn new insights around the aging marketplace of the future.” Staged at The Broadmoor in Colorado Springs, where I was formerly advertising and public relations director, the Summit brought together professionals involved in aging services, home healthcare, architecture, homebuilding, academics, medicine, technology, wellness, retailing, and of course, marketing. Participating organizations included Ecumen, Eskaton, IDEO, GE, Pfizer, Intel and AARP.
A significant part of this exercise in “deep conversation” involved forming interdisciplinary innovation groups addressing seven topical areas, including “home based care,” “new financial models,” “dementia and cognitive health,” and “livable communities.” I joined a group discussing the future of “prevention and wellness,” an area that his interested me for decades and has involved clients of Brent Green & Associates, such as EAS, Men’s Fitness magazine, the Institute for Health Realities, Men’s Health magazine, and Nestle.
Although wellness encompasses a vast array of subspecialties, from nutrition to socialization, I suggested we focus our discussion on sarcopenia. Knowing that this clinical-sounding word needed a more innovative title, a preventative medicine physician on our team suggested “Strong Muscle, Strong Living” as a friendlier, more benefit-oriented statement of purpose.
From this starting point, the innovation team began envisioning business possibilities. We summarized our innovation as follows: “An integrated package of products and services with substantial media messaging dedicated to empowering the 50+ market to maintain muscle strength and mobility across the life span. This package includes assessment, nutrition science, exercise technology, positive messaging, mobility health and education.”
Imagine a public service media campaign developed to help adults 50+ become more aware of the hazards and risks associated with unchecked muscle wasting. What if the alien word “sarcopenia” or a friendlier euphemism became as familiar to the public as ED — erectile dysfunction? Could this campaign reduce healthcare costs by focusing 50+ adults on muscle maintenance long before the pernicious downward spiral toward frailty begins?
Our innovation team then imagined some business implications of sarcopenia mitigation as a public health priority. The first obvious area of opportunity lies in nutrition science.
Abbott, for example, recently introduced a brand extension of Ensure, its nutritional beverage supplement often associated with eldercare institutions. The company has named its new product Ensure Muscle Health. Flavored shakes include 13 grams of protein, 24 vitamins and minerals, and a quixotic new ingredient Abbott calls “Revigor,” an amino acid metabolite.
Beta-hydroxy beta-methylbutyrate, popularly referred to as HMB, is a supplement that may act as a “protein breakdown suppressor” and thus can serve as a performance facilitator for resistance training such as weight lifting. According to some proponents, HMB boosts strength levels, enhances gains in muscle size and strength, and prevents post-workout muscle tissue breakdown. Clearly, nutrition science can become the wellspring of future supplemental food products that lessen sarcopenia progression while improving strength and endurance in older adults.
Proponents of HMB and other supplements insist that nutrition by itself will not prevent muscle wasting. Thus, opportunities abound for fitness equipment designers to develop machines and training regimens that can help Boomers work out more effectively and frequently. A fitness machine has yet to be invented that takes a lot of the work out of working out, thus helping users push through psychological resistance to resistance training.
The next successful video workout program may be waiting for a superstar proponent. For example, Jane Fonda’s Workout has been credited for launching the fitness craze among Boomers who in the 1980s were arriving in middle age.
The 73-year-old, Oscar-winning actress introduced in 2010 a new DVD set targeting older adults called Jane Fonda Prime Time. Two new videos are entitled “Walk Out” and “Fit and Strong,” with the first focused on aerobics and the second on strength training. This regimen is heading in the right direction, but the exercise level required to participate is more suited to those already experiencing handicapping physical limitations. The most on-target innovation may be a hybrid series of workouts: less aggressive than youth-oriented P90X and more challenging than Fonda’s tamed-down workout for folks already significantly limited by disabilities.
Sarcopenia, a mystical word not to be confused with a Greek isle in the Aegean Sea, stimulates grand possibilities for innovation… in nutrition science, fitness equipment, video training programs, retirement community social engineering, public education, consumer products, and marketing budgets to sell all the aforementioned opportunities. Our innovation team agreed that not only can a national focus on sarcopenia potentially mitigate premature aging and death, but this agenda could further reduce spurious healthcare financial burdens confronting the nation.
Strong muscles mean stronger, sometimes longer lives. Through sarcopenia mitigation, Boomers can compress their morbidity — thereby lessening the burdens of old age illnesses by compressing an unwanted time of life into the shortest period possible before the final exit.
To visualize this cultural and business revolution personified, think of Jack LaLanne, a pioneer in fitness and strength training, who had a robust and productive life until age 96, dying from pneumonia after just a few weeks of illness. Strong muscles, strong life, quick death from natural causes. The circle of life doesn’t come full circle any better.
Most of us consider ourselves lucky if we find a single mentor early in life — someone who has the wisdom and compassion to lead us closer to our dreams, talents and values. It is even rarer to discover a mentor later in life who nudges us to reconsider where we’ve come from and where we’re heading next.
One man I first met just eight years ago had an influence on me that changed the way I pursued a marketing career fettered by twentieth-century baggage. His name is David B. Wolfe, and he finished his work and gave us his final gifts during this lifetime on Saturday, December 3, 2011.
The best way I can honor David’s memory is to tell you how he influenced my thinking, as he has countless other colleagues worldwide.
As a young advertising executive I had three demographic priorities as I planned campaigns and made media buys: adults 18 to 34, adults 18 to 49, and adults 25 to 54.
These arbitrary, age-based segmentations meant more investments in younger markets because most believed that the value of older consumers falls with rising age. Traditionally, post-50 consumers faded from marketers’ radar screens altogether, except of course for age-specific products addressing health deficiencies due to aging such as Geritol and Depends.
Today, youth-dominated marketing has become increasingly counterproductive. The 25-to-44-age cohort, which spends most per capita on automobiles, housing and housing related products, shrank by 4.3 million people in the first decade of the new century. People 40 and older now outnumber 18-to-39-year olds by 138 million to 87 million.
Then along came David.
For over 25 years, he has been an articulate and respected author and spokesman for Ageless Marketing and a paradigm shift toward understanding changing consumer needs as we age. David stood among a handful of thought leaders who recognized the idiosyncrasies of customer behavior in middle-age and beyond — those who understood the economic potential of older consumer segments. He then provoked innovative thinking about marketing to older adults through two seminal books: Serving the Ageless Market and Ageless Marketing.
David was also a visionary in identifying shifting business values paralleling population aging, a maturing, if you will, of the value that companies and their products bring to our lives. He brilliantly expressed these insights as coauthor of the influential business book, Firms of Endearment.
His most recent book, Brave New Worldview, investigates how society’s values are dramatically changing as a result of underlying trends of aging demographics and psychosocial maturation of the human species. For one, we’re finally learning to think with both hemispheres of our brains, an evolutionary change that may be fundamental to survival of humankind.
Because of loving assistance from friends and colleagues in The Society, a mature marketing think group David cofounded with Dick Ambrosius in 1993, this book will be published soon. It is noteworthy and characteristic that David devoted all his diminishing energy to finishing this book, editing and polishing up to and including the final day of his life.
David will be missed by many colleagues and friends worldwide. Yet his legacy will live on for generations. And every person reading this homage can pay tribute to the memory of a cheerful and thoughtful man by recognizing and elevating the economic and societal importance of aging consumer markets.
Among all the accomplishments of his lifetime, David will be remembered as an articulate and forceful friend for the ages.
Note: It was my privilege to interview David earlier this year for my radio program, Generation Reinvention. You can listen to David’s final reflections about his work, his books and his values by visiting the WGRN network show page.
Amazing conversations awaken a stronger sense of where the Boomer generation is heading. Amazing conversations instill clarity, insight, motivation ... even hope. Amazing conversations showcase the brightest minds in Boomer business, marketing and aging today. Thought leaders. Trendsetters.
For nearly a year, I have been undertaking a radio host odyssey on the WeEarth Global Radio Network. Dovetailing my new book, the show is entitled Generation Reinvention: How Boomers Are Changing the Future.
Guests on my show have included a remarkable cast of thinkers and creators. What they have to say is worth your time, and you can listen to their commentary today and in the future at your convenience, at any moment you want to hear some amazing conversations.
Jed Diamond, Ph.D.
Generation Reinvention 1: The Future of Boomer Men
Jed Diamond, Ph.D. is Director of the MenAlive, a health program that helps men live long and well. Since its inception, Jed has been on the Board of Advisors of the Men's Health Network. He is also a member of the International Society for the Study of the Aging Male and serves as a member of the International Scientific Board of the World Congress on Men's Health. He is the author of many influential books including Male Menopause and The Irritable Male Syndrome.
Generation Reinvention 2: The Future of Boomer Women
As a leading voice of her generation of women, Carol Orsborn, Ph.D. is CEO of BoomerCommunication.com, and serves as Senior Strategist with Vibrant Nation.com, the largest online community of educated, passionate women 50+. Her blogs and op-eds on work/life run regularly on the site, as well as on the Huffington Post, Humana’s Real4Me and Divine Caroline.com. She has appeared on Oprah and on The Today Show multiple times, and in the pages of People Magazine and The New York Times, among many others. Carol is the author of Boom: Marketing to the Ultimate Power Consumer--the Baby Boomer Woman and The Art of Resilience.
Generation Reinvention 3: the Future of Advertising
Chuck Nyren is an award-winning advertising video producer, creative strategist, copywriter, consultant, and speaker focusing on The International Baby Boomer Market. He has been a consultant for advertising and marketing agencies and companies with products for the 40+ Market, including AARP, National Association of Home Builders, Harris Interactive, AstraZeneca, Bayard Presse (France), The Seattle Direct Marketing Association, WPP's Commonhealth, and Omnicom Group. He is consultant with The Faith Popcorn BrainReserve TalentBank and is on the Advisory Board of GRAND Magazine. Chuck is the author of Advertising to Baby Boomers.
Generation Reinvention 4: The Stories of Our Lives
Greg Dobbs worked for ABC News for 23 years, starting in Chicago as an editor for ABC Radio’s Paul Harvey, then for TV as a producer, then in 1973 becoming a correspondent. In 1977 assigned to ABC’s bureau in London, then in 1982 to Paris, and in mid-1986 to ABC's new bureau in Denver. Memorable domestic news stories covered: the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the San Francisco earthquake, the execution of Gary Gilmore, the Watergate hearings, and the Indian occupation of Wounded Knee Major foreign news stories: the Gulf War; the occupation of the US embassy in Iran; the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; the Iran-Iraq war; the ouster of Idi Amin from Uganda; the assassination of Anwar Sadat in Egypt; and the ill-fated Royal Wedding of Charles and Diana in England.
Generation Reinvention 5: the Future of Retirement Housing and Age Inclusiveness in Television
For three decades, John Erickson envisioned and built innovative communities for seniors, understanding before most that an active, social lifestyle and access to good health care were essential for the mental and physical health of seniors. As the founder of Erickson Retirement Communities, the company operates 20 retirement communities with more than 23,000 residents in 11 states. He could have stopped there. But instead, he took what he possessed — a deep understanding of senior America and its strengths — and launched cable network Retirement Living TV in 2006, to provide a new voice to a generation largely ignored by television media.
Generation Reinvention 6: Boomers to Zoomers, the Future of Aging in Canada
David Cravit is Executive Vice President of ZoomerMedia Ltd. David possesses over 30 years’ experience in advertising, marketing and consulting in Canada and the US. Previous to working with ZoomerMedia, David was a partner in Saffer Cravit & Freedman Advertising, which he helped take from start-up to over $150 million in annual billings. The agency had offices in Toronto and Chicago, and was recognized as a leading retail specialist agency in North America. After selling his interest in the business, David worked as an independent consultant to other advertising agencies in Canada and the USA, before joining ZoomerMedia in November 2005. David is author of The New Old.
Generation Reinvention 7: Marketing to Boomers, an International Perspective
Lori Bitter launched Continuum Crew following the closure of JWT BOOM, the nation’s leading mature market advertising and marketing company. As President, she was responsible for mature consumer strategy across a number of industries, most notably age targeted and age restricted real estate. In her role at JWT BOOM, Lori managed the production of LiveWire: The Summit (formerly the Beyond the Numbers conference) for five years. She was the editor of LiveWire, a quarterly publication, and she is author of numerous white papers on topics relevant to the senior and Boomer population.
Generation Reinvention 8: The Future of the Aging Brain
In his book The Myth of Alzheimer’s: What You Aren’t Being Told About Today’s Most Dreaded Diagnosis, Peter Whitehouse M.D., Ph.D. and his protégé, Daniel George, address the very foundation of our cultural and social relationships to the most dreaded disease of modern times.With more than 30 years of experience as a scientist and geriatric neurologist, Dr. Whitehouse, himself a Boomer, has been at the forefront of the evolution of the disease we call Alzheimer’s. He has earned over a million dollars consulting with pharmaceutical companies about development of cholinesterase inhibitors, the contemporary silver bullets in drug therapies for early treatment of disease symptoms.
Generation Reinvention 9: The Future of Business, Ageless Marketing, and a Brave New Worldview
For over 20 years, David Wolfe has been the most articulate and respected author and spokesman for Ageless Marketing and a paradigm shift toward understanding changing consumer needs as we age. David is an internationally recognized customer behavior expert in middle-age and older markets. Author and coauthor of three published books, including his breakaway Ageless Marketing, David has also been a thought-leader in identifying shifting business values, a maturing, if you will, of the value companies and their products bring to our lives. His most recent work, an exciting and penetrating new book, investigates how society’s values are dramatically changing.
Richard Adler is the architect and leader of an important research study on Boomers for the Institute for the Future. Thirty years ago, he was appointed to a position at the Aspen Institute Program on Communications and Society, where he considered the potential of “pay television” to change the economics of TV programming, anticipating subscription networks like HBO that emerged a few years later. In the early 1980s, when new digital media were emerging, Richard joined the Institute for the Future, a nonprofit think tank in Silicon Valley, where he focused on the emergence of “online services.” In the mid-1980s, at a time when these services were being used by less than one percent of Americans, he was asked to provide a “vision” for the state of the technology in the year 2000. He predicted (correctly) that by 2000, half of all Americans would be online. This visionary has a lot to say about the next 20 years.
Generation Reinvention 11: The Next 20 Years, Part 2
Thomas Frey, Ph.D. is Executive Director and Senior Futurist at the DaVinci Institute, a futurist think-tank based near Boulder, Colorado. His blog on emerging technologies has been recognized by Popular Science magazine as one of the top five science blogs. He is the top-rated futurist speaker by Google. Before launching the DaVinci Institute, Tom spent 15 years at IBM as an engineer and designer where he received over 270 awards, more than any other IBM engineer. He is also a past member of the Triple Nine Society (High I.Q. society over 99.9 percentile).
Generation Reinvention 12: The Future of Boomer Aging in the United Kingdom
Dick Stroud is a consultant, lecturer, writer, and one of Great Britain’s most influential thinkers about the 50+ market niche. His company 20plus30 specializes in advising companies how to capture the buying power of 50-plus consumers. He is author of The 50-Plus Market, an impressive 315-page exploration of business with the lucrative, influential 50+ marketplace. He has taught at the London Business School, American University in London, and Southampton Business School. Before running his own company he worked for IBM and PA Management Consultants.
Generation Reinvention 13: Age Branding, Cognitive Fitness and the Future of Retirement Housing
In 1981, Dick Ambrosius formed one of the first consulting firms to specialize in marketing to middle age and older adults. This led to his selection as Entrepreneur of the Year in 1997 by Entrepreneur Magazine. In 1980, he was appointed by President Ronald Reagan as the youngest member of the National Advisory Committee to the 1981 White House Conference on Aging, which he attended as a delegate and keynote speaker. In 2004, he was appointed as a delegate-at-large for the 2005 White House Conference on Aging. Today he serves as Vice President of Outreach and Group Programs for NeoCORTA Inc., which offers scientifically-designed assessments for future brain fitness and provides users with a road map to maintain or improve their future cognitive health.
Generation Reinvention 14: Retirement Housing for the Boomer Future
Jeff Rosenfeld, Ph.D. is Director of the Gerontology Program and Gerontology Center at Hofstra University. He is a gerontologist with an interest in the interplay between aging and home-design. Along with Wid Chapman, he is the author of Home Design in an Aging World. His newest book, entitled Un-Assisted Living, also co-authored by Wid Chapman, will be published in the fall of 2011 by Random House. In addition to Hofstra University, Jeff teaches as an adjunct at Parsons School of Design in Manhattan. He received his Ph.D. at Stony Brook.
Generation Reinvention 15: Boomers and the Future of Aging in Asia Pacific Countries
Kim Walker is founder and CEO of SILVER, based in Singapore, the first strategic business and marketing consultancy in Asia Pacific focused on Boomers and 50+ consumers. Before founding SILVER, Kim has held local and regional C-suite positions in Singapore, Hong Kong, New York, and Tokyo. He is Asia’s top expert on the 50+ market. Most recently he was President and CEO for M&C Saatchi in Asia. He has been a senior executive with Carat Asia Pacific and Bates Worldwide. He has launched new operations or led acquisitions in most Asian markets.
Generation Reinvention 16: Boomers and the Future of Retirement Readiness and Security
Mark Miller is a journalist, author and editor who writes about trends in retirement and aging. He has a special focus on how the Baby Boomer Generation is revising its approach to careers, money and lifestyles after age 50. Mark edits and publishes RetirementRevised.com, featured as one of the best retirement planning sites on the web in the May 2010 issue of Money Magazine. Author of The Hard Times Guide to Retirement Security, he also writes Retire Smart, a syndicated weekly newspaper column and also contributes weekly to Reuters.com.
Generation Reinvention 17: Spiritual Journeys of Middle Age and the Future of Aging in America
Harry “Rick” Moody, Ph.D. understands implications of aging in ways that are both profound and practical. In his marvelous book entitled The Five Stages of the Soul: Charting the Spiritual Passages That Shape Our Lives, he reveals challenges and possibilities presented us as we age by focusing on the spiritual stages through which most of us pass. The outcome of careful spiritual exploration can be significant answers to deeper questions about the meaning of our lives. From a business perspective, Rick is Director of Academic Affairs for AARP in Washington, DC, where he has gained and contributed much practical wisdom about the social, economic and cultural aspects of aging today. He also serves as Senior Associate with the International Longevity Center-USA and Senior Fellow of Civic Ventures.
Generation Reinvention 18: Laughing Our Way to A Spectacular, Incredible … Old Age
Marc Sotkin was formerly head writer for The Golden Girls. He began his writing career in 1976 and has been a staff writer and producer on more than 350 episodes of various situation comedies for every television network. His credits also include Laverne & Shirley, as well as co-writing and producing two Garry Shandling specials for Showtime. He has been honored with multiple Emmy, Golden Globe and Cable Ace award nominations and has won a prestigious Writers Guild Award. But this is a Boomer comedy writer who has reinvented himself. Presently, he appears in his weekly Boomer Alley videos. In addition he hosts Boomer Alley Radio which airs weekly in Los Angeles on CBS affiliate KFWB, across Colorado on the Radio Colorado Network, and is podcast to the universe.
Generation Reinvention 19: Boomers and the Future of Conscious Consumerism
Frank Lampe is one of the thought leaders in the healthy living / sustainability marketplace, so-called conscious consumerism or Lifestyles of Health & Sustainability (LOHAS). He brings more than 23 years of media and communications management experience to his role as director of communications with the American Herbal Products Association. As a co-founder of Natural Business Communications, he and his team introduced and quantified the LOHAS concept and produced the groundbreaking LOHAS Journal business magazine and the LOHAS Market Trends Conference. He was the editorial director at New Hope Natural Media, where he launched several trade titles, and is a former editor of Natural Foods Merchandiser.
Generation Reinvention 20: Marketing to PrimeTime Women and the Future of Business
Marti Barletta is the world’s foremost authority on marketing to women. She is the author of the groundbreaking book, Marketing to Women, which is now available in 15 languages, and co-author with Tom Peters of Trends (July 2005), who named her MVP/BizGuru of 2005. Her new book is PrimeTime Women: How to Win the Hearts, Minds, and Business of Boomer Big Spenders. In this book Marti breaks the story on the unprecedented buying power of women in their prime (ages 50-70) and details why this "silver bullet" segment is the prime source of business growth for the next two decades. As the recognized international authority on marketing to women, Marti is frequently quoted on CBS Evening News, ABC Money Matters, MSNBC's Squawk Box and NPR's Talk of the Nation, as well as in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Fast Company, BusinessWeek, Entrepreneur and many other publications worldwide.
Generation Reinvention 21: 1969 — a Tumultuous Year That Shaped the Boomer Future
Rob Kirkpatrick captured the concluding year of the sixties in a book entitled 1969: The Year Everything Changed. He has also written Magic in the Night: the Words and Music of Bruce Springsteen. Rob was a featured commentator in the History Channel documentary Sex in '69: The Sexual Revolution in America and has worked in the book publishing industry for more than a dozen years as an editor. He is also a blogger for Huffington Post.
Generation Reinvention 22: Active Boomer Women and the Future of Travel
Kathy Dragon has more than two decades of experience in the Adventure and Experiential Travel industry including designing, marketing, selling, guiding and operating small group tours worldwide for active adults. She started leading bike tours in 1987, and she’s since trained hundreds of guides and tour operators on the nuances of understanding the North American PrimeTime Traveler (50-70 yr old) whose impact is substantial and whose needs and interests are unique within the global travel community. From Patagonia to Provence, Kilimanjaro to Komodo, Kathy has been there and personally escorted over 3000 guests (primarily Boomers) on life-changing adventures.
Generation Reinvention 23: Baby Boomers, Magazine Publishing and the Future of Sustainability
Bryan Welch and his family raise cattle, sheep, goats and chickens on a 50-acre farm, which they call Rancho Cappuccino. All their animals range freely, and the grazing animals are strictly grass-fed. When he’s not farming, he runs Ogden Publications, a diversified media, consulting and affinity marketing company. His company has grown rapidly over the past few years and now publishes 10 magazines for people interested in self-sufficiency, sustainability, rural lifestyles and farm collectibles. Familiar titles include Mother Earth News, Utne Reader, Natural Home and The Herb Companion. Combined, the publisher’s magazines have over 2-million readers, and their websites attract more than 3 million unique visitors each month.
Generation Reinvention 24: Boomers, Lifelong Learning and the Future of Educational Travel
J. Mara DelliPriscoli is President of Travel Learning Connections, Inc. She is the founder and architect of the Educational Travel Conference. With this conference platform she has facilitated the growth of strategic business partnerships and business-to-business networking of those in the field of alumni, museum, conservation and affinity group travel. With over 30 years experience in the tourism industry, Mara has directly worked in most sectors of the travel industry including marketing, sales, tour and hotel operations, and transportation, trade and government research firms. Mara is in a sense synonymous with educational travel, and with Boomers educational travel is the future.
Generation Reinvention 25: Lifestyles of Health & Sustainability and Boomer Healthy Aging
As Managing Partner at NMI, Steve French has over 25 years of marketing, consulting, and management experience across numerous industries. With his focus on healthy aging, wellness, and social sustainability, he works with many global clients on developing new business opportunities, strategic planning, and market research projects. He has pioneered a range of NMI consumer databases that analyze attitudes and behavior, including NMI’s Healthy Aging/Boomer Database. As a recognized industry expert, Steve’s expertise is also welcomed on a regular basis by global media. He is an author of numerous reports and articles, and he is a regular speaker at many industry events worldwide.
Generation Reinvention 26: Changing Aging and the Future of Boomer Elderhood
Dr. Bill Thomas is a visionary leader in the online Changing Aging movement and a renowned expert on geriatric medicine and eldercare. He is author of an award-winning examination of aging, entitled What Are Old People For?. His forthcoming, much-anticipated book on Boomer aging is entitled The Second Crucible. Recipient of numerous awards, including the Ashoka Fellowship, America’s Award, Heinz Award and Giraffe Award, Bill is also a professor at UMBC’s Erickson School of Aging, a musician, author of six books and an insatiable social media consumer and blogger.
Generation Reinvention 27: Creating Empowering Stories about Active Aging for TV, Radio and Online
A broadcast veteran, Marc Middleton spent 14 years as Sports Director and anchor at WESH-TV in Orlando before moving to the News Anchor Desk. Among his many assignments, Marc covered the Olympics in Barcelona, Sydney and Athens. Marc is an award-winning reporter whose work has been recognized with two Emmys, 5 Emmy Nominations, the Dupont Award for Excellence in Journalism, AP Sportscaster of the Year and two UPI Sportscaster of the Year awards. Marc also served as WESH’s technology reporter and helped produce the stations first-ever streaming Webcasts, blogs and podcasts.
Bill Shafer is co-host of Growing Bolder TV and the Growing Bolder Radio Show. A broadcast veteran considered one of America’s best storytellers, Bill has been one of Florida’s most honored journalists for nearly three decades. As news anchor, sports director and lifestyle reporter, he brought seemingly ordinary people to the forefront and proved everyone has a story. He has won countless national awards for his work. In his spare time, Bill is a youth ice hockey coach.
Generation Reinvention 28: Marketing to Boomers through Online Engagement and Digital Media
David Weigelt co-founded Immersion Active, the only interactive agency in the United States solely focused on Boomers and seniors. In the spring of 2009, David, along with Immersion Active partner Jonathan Boehman, released his first book on how to engage mature consumers online through a developmental relationship marketing approach. Entitled Dot Boom: Marketing to Baby Boomers through Meaningful Online Engagement, the book has received praise from national and international marketing notables, including Microsoft, PBS, and AARP.
Generation Reinvention 29: Marketing and Advertising to Boomers and 50+ in Holland
Arjan in't Veld is founder and director of Bureauvijftig, a marketing and communications agency that specializes in 50+. (Bureauvijftig is Dutch for Agency Fifty.) Arjan graduated at Radboud University, Nijmegen, focusing on “Baby Boomer marketing.” In 2005, he was one of the first marketers addressing this niche in the Netherlands. Bureauvijftig is based in Utrecht and provides services for a variety of organizations: from Volkswagen and Thomas Cook, to the Academic Hospital and a local healthcare institute. His firm’s main focus is to translate 50+ consumer insights into successful marketing communication programs. Arjan is also cofounder and partner of a large healthcare portal for caretakers.
Generation Reinvention 30: Boomers and The Big Shift to a New Life Stage
Marc Freedman is CEO and founder of Civic Ventures, a think tank on Boomers, work and social purpose. He spearheaded creation of Experience Corps, now one of America’s largest nonprofit national service programs engaging people over 55, and The Purpose Prize, which annually provides five $100,000 prizes to social innovators in the second half of life. Author of newly released The Big Shift: Navigating the New Stage beyond Midlife, Marc eloquently argues that it is now time for society and culture to embrace a new life stage between middle age and old age.
Generation Reinvention 31: The Future of Integrated and Online Marketing to 50+ Consumers
Todd Harff brings a unique perspective to help clients achieve business results through his agency, Creating Results. In addition to his work with clients, Todd is a respected writer and featured speaker about marketing to the 50+ adult. He is a frequent contributor to industry publications. Todd has addressed regional and national conferences on a variety of topics related to marketing, advertising, website design and public relations.
Generation Reinvention 32: Boomers and the Future of Computer Software, Hardware and Online Technologies
Gary Moulton, Ph.D. is a product manager in Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Group. He is responsible for the company’s strategic initiatives that focus on the use of technology by older adults (50+). In this role he is in charge of all efforts the company is making in the aging market segment. This includes product innovations for Baby Boomers. Prior to his current aging-related responsibilities he was the company’s assistive technology relations product manager. In this role he was responsible for coordinating Microsoft’s marketing efforts with assistive technology manufacturers, and he was the manager of Microsoft’s Assistive Technology Vendor Program.
Generation Reinvention 33: Boomers, The Experience Economy and Authenticity
Joe Pine is an internationally acclaimed author, speaker, and management advisor to Fortune 500 companies and entrepreneurial start-ups. He is co-founder of Strategic Horizons LLP, a thinking studio dedicated to helping businesses conceive and design new ways of adding value to their economic offerings. Joe and his partner Jim Gilmore wrote "The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business a Stage." Realizing that in a world of increasingly paid-for experiences people no longer accept the fake from the phony, but want the real from the genuine, so Pine & Gilmore wrote “Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want” in October 2007.
Generation Reinvention 34: Turning on Your Bright Light: Spiritual and Life Lessons for a Generation
Thirty years ago a gifted young actress from Kansas risked security and comfort to become part of the movie-making industry in Hollywood. Two years later she landed the role of a lifetime and walked onto a soundstage for Stephen Spielberg’s movie, “E.T.: The Extraterrestrial.” Her character Mary, a smart, funny young mother, was about to change this actress’s life, as well as a generation’s views of modern motherhood. This heralded portrayal raised as many questions as it did answers for the rising star. In the three decades since her first day of work on the film, those questions have been answered. In her new book, Bright Light, Dee Wallace shares her touching story and wisdom that can help each of us rekindle and nurture the heartlight that guides us home to our true self.
Generation Reinvention 35: A Consciousness Revolution for Boomers
Duncan Campbell holds degrees from the Sorbonne, Yale College and Harvard Law School. In the last 40 years he has gained extensive experience in the fields of psychology, philosophy, spirituality, law, business, finance, politics, communications and teaching. Duncan’s radio program, entitled Living Dialogues®, features conversations with consciousness pioneers — some known to a larger public and others lesser known or as yet unknown — yet all embodying the best in new paradigm thinking in a broad variety of fields.
Generation Reinvention 36: A Journalist’s Look at Boomers and Aging
Paul Kleyman is the Director of the Ethnic Elders Newsbeat at New America Media (NAM), a division of Pacific News Service reaching 60 million ethnic audience members in the United States. From 1988 through 2008, he was the editor of Aging Today, a newspaper of the American Society on Aging. He co-founded and is National Coordinator of the Journalists Network on Generations and edits its e-newsletter, Generations Beat Online. He is also an invited blogger for The Huffington Post.
Generation Reinvention 37: Boomer Women, Successful Aging, and Reinventing Retirement
Helen Dennis calls upon Boomer and older women to shape a new kind of retirement, one that she refers to as “renewment” to emphasize the possibility of positive change, enlightenment, and adventure. Helen is a nationally recognized leader on issues of aging, employment and the new retirement. In the academic environment, she has received awards for her university teaching at the University of Southern California’s Davis School at the Andrus Gerontology Center.
Generation Reinvention 38: Boomers and the Challenges and Opportunities of Caregiving
Andy Cohen is Chief Executive Officer and a co-founder of Caring.com. He oversees the company’s operations and finances, with the goal of establishing Caring.com as the premiere website for people taking care of their parents and other aging loved ones. Andy has launched four successful web businesses, taking them from start-up to tens of millions of dollars in revenue. In a 20-year career before founding Caring.com, he held leadership positions in management, marketing, and sales with S.C. Johnson Wax, Intuit, Peapod, Instill, and SuccessFactors.
Jack York founded It’s Never 2 Late in the summer of 1999 after spending 14 years in the Silicon Valley. He retired from that industry as vice-president of strategic sales for Vishay Intertechnology. In 1998, he began donating computers to assisted living centers in California. This endeavor became a labor of love, and the enthusiasm that the seniors showed in jumping into the computer world motivated him to establish It’s Never 2 Late. Jack speaks internationally on how adaptive technology should be accessible to all older adults in senior living communities. It’s Never 2 Late specializes in constructing adaptive computer labs for older adults in all stages of life.
Generation Reinvention 39: Baby Boomers and the Transformational Power of the Age Wave
Dr. Ken Dychtwald is a leading expert on the ways that Baby Boomers are aging differently than any generation in history. He is widely regarded as North America’s foremost visionary and original thinker regarding the lifestyle, marketing, healthcare and workforce implications of the age wave. He is a psychologist, gerontologist, documentary filmmaker, entrepreneur and best-selling author of sixteen books on aging-related issues, including Bodymind, Age Wave, Age Power, The Power Years and Workforce Crisis.
Generation Reinvention 40: Boomer Consumers Living and Buying in the Natural World
Steve Hoffman is co-owner of Best Organics LLC, a leading organic gift company, and serves as chair of Naturally Boulder, an economic development initiative established by the City of Boulder to promote the growth of natural and organic businesses in the region. Steve is also cofounder of LOHAS Journal and the annual LOHAS Forum. He is the former national Marketing Director and Rocky Mountain regional Sales Manager for Arrowhead Mills. He served for more than eight years as the Editorial Director of Natural Foods Merchandiser, a leading trade magazine published by New Hope Natural Media and as Education Director for Natural Products Expo.
Generation Reinvention 41: Boomers and the Future of the Spa Industry
Michael Stusser is founder of Osmosis, a popular spa in northern California. His discovery of the Cedar Enzyme Bath was a life-changing experience that led him to create Osmosis. This destination day spa has grown in twenty-five years into a nationally known hospitality location on five acres with extensive mediation gardens. Osmosis was recently acknowledged as “Americas Most Spiritual Spa” by Spirituality and Health magazine.
Christina MacInnes is Chief Operating Officer for Crystal Mountain Resort and Spa. Chris and her husband Jim have transformed this family-owned business into one of the Midwest’s premier four-season resort destinations. In addition, she is president of Crystal Properties Inc., the resort’s development company, and serves on its board of directors.
Generation Reinvention 42: Boomers, Wildcards, and High-Impact Transformations of the Future
John L. Petersen has been widely recognized as one of the most informed futurists in the world. He is best-known for writing and thinking about high impact surprises—called wild cards—and the process of surprise anticipation. His current professional involvements include the development of sophisticated tools for anticipatory analysis, surprise anticipation, and helping leadership design new approaches for dealing with the future. An award-winning writer, Petersen’s first book, “The Road to 2015: Profiles of the Future” was awarded Outstanding Academic Book of 1995 by CHOICE Academic Review, and remained on The World Future Society’s best-seller list for more than a year. His latest book, “Out of the Blue: How to Anticipate Wild Cards and Big Future Surprises,” was also a WFS best-seller.
Generation Reinvention 43: Boomers and the Future of Healthcare, Aging and Marketing
John Zweig is Chairman of Healthcare and Specialist Communications for WPP. His role is to develop the Group’s capabilities and coordinate client services on behalf of WPP’s firms specialized by discipline, audience and industry. With a particular emphasis on healthcare clients, John provides access to these resources and capabilities around the world. Prior to becoming CEO of WPP’s Branding & Identity, Healthcare and Specialist Communications businesses, John was President of Thomas Ferguson Associates and founded CommonHealth in 1992; during the ten-year course of his leadership, he helped build CommonHealth into the largest and most respected integrated marketing firm of its type.
Generation Reinvention 44: Boomers, Medicinal Plants and New Paths to Healthy Aging
Chris Kilham is a medicine hunter, author and educator. The founder of Medicine Hunter Inc., he has conducted medicinal research in over 20 countries. He is the FOX News Medicine Hunter and appears on FOX News Health online in the US and international television markets. e is Explorer in Residence at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst where he teaches the popular ethnobotany course The Shaman’s Pharmacy through the Department of Plant & Soil Sciences. He has appeared as a guest expert on several hundred radio and television programs including news programs on ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, CNBC, CNN, MSNBC, BBC, FOX TV, and NPR. He has appeared as a guest on The Dr. Oz Show, and is a regular guest on FOX News Ask Dr. Manny.
Generation Reinvention 45: Boomers, the High Costs of Growing Old and Long-Term Care
Wendy Boglioli, a former Olympic swimmer and Gold Medalist, is a motivational speaker and spokeswoman for Genworth Financial. She is best known for winning the gold medal in the 4x100m freestyle relay in world record time at the 1976 Montréal. The gold was particularly crucial to the U.S. women’s team as it was the only gold medal awarded to American women during the games. Wendy then served as assistant coach of the Yale University Swim Team, before embarking on a career as a motivational speaker and spokesperson. In 1997, she entered the long-term care insurance field and currently serves as national spokeswoman for Genworth Financial’s Long Term Care Division.
Generation Reinvention 46: Aging and the Search for Authentic Power and Spiritual Partnerships
Gary Zukav is the author of “The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics,” winner of The American Book Award for Science; “The Seat of the Soul,” the celebrated #1 New York Times bestseller; “Soul Stories,” also a New York Times bestseller; and many others. His books have sold millions of copies and are published in twenty-four languages. Gary has appeared on the Oprah show 35 times, more than any other guest.
Linda Francis has been practicing the creation of authentic power since she read “The Seat of the Soul” in 1989. In 1993 she met Gary Zukav and they created a spiritual partnership which is in its eighteenth year. During this time, she co-authored with Gary two New York Times bestsellers, “The Heart of the Soul: Emotional Awareness” and “The Mind of the Soul: Responsible Choice.” Linda has been in the healing profession for three decades, first as a registered nurse and then as a chiropractor.
Generation Reinvention 47: Journey of a World Champion Public Speaker and Lessons for Boomers Reinventing
Ed Tate won the coveted Toastmasters International World Championship of Public Speaking, finishing ahead of 175,000 members from 70 countries. To date, he has spoken professionally in 46 states, 12 countries and on five continents. Ed’s success in business has spanned more than two decades. Since 1998, Ed has been principal of Ed Tate & Associates, LLC, a professional development firm that provides keynote and endnote presentations and workshops, as well as in-person and do-it-yourself tools and expertise on Leadership, Executive Presentation Skills, The Challenges of Change, Management, and Sales Presentation Skills.
Please check back periodically. This blog post is a dynamic representation of our amazing guests who are shaping the future for Generation Reinvention.
“Indeed, if there is one sentiment that unites the crises in Europe and America it is a powerful sense of 'baby boomers behaving badly' -- a powerful sense that the generation that came of age in the last 50 years, my generation, will be remembered most for the incredible bounty and freedom it received from its parents and the incredible debt burden and constraints it left on its kids.”
Thomas Friedman, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The New York Times, wrote these observations last July while visiting Athens, Greece, where he apparently achieved a commanding view of the debt and unemployment crises confounding his homeland.
Several weeks later while I was watching Fareed Zakaria’s GPS news-magazine on CNN, special guest Tom Friedman reiterated his generational vitriol. He criticized Boomers and their “situational values” in contrast with their parents' generation which maintained “sustainable values.”
According to the celebrated editorial columnist, The Greatest Generation saved prodigiously, consumed prudently, and elevated the nation into an international economic powerhouse following World War II. On the other hand, Boomers have been profligate spenders while failing to leave the nation in better condition than the nation they inherited from their parents.
My parents were members of the Greatest or G.I. Generation, and I respectfully honor them and their generation’s significant accomplishments. They delivered our nation from the evil of World War II and created an enviable post-war economy. They sacrificed much. However, I cannot rebut Tom Friedman’s critique of Baby Boomers without also addressing his hagiography of our parents’ generation.
When I graduated from college in 1972, Boomers faced an arduous employment market due to their large numbers and a tired industrial economy running out of jobs. Interest rates had started escalating to extraordinary heights. Housing prices began inflating beyond reach of many first-time home buyers.
Severe segregation still controlled the nation’s social and cultural institutions. President Richard Nixon’s Watergate crisis had become the obsession of news media. Industry routinely assaulted the environment, with The Love Canal Disaster being paradigmatic. A polarizing Vietnam War inspired outrage from most corners of society while draining the U.S. Treasury. An OPEC oil embargo hovered on the horizon.
I remember well the first credit card offering I received and its alluring promise of “buy now, pay later.” The consumer credit card companies emerging then fell under the direction of financial wizards from the G.I. Generation. For example, Joseph P. Williams, born in 1915, created the first nationwide bank credit card in 1958, which later evolved into the VISA brand. This industry thrived through the last half of the 20th century by encouraging Boomers to spend and consume. Our culture celebrated consumption, fostering debt and imprudent overspending: greed is good.
Nevertheless, Boomers have nurtured a more egalitarian society than previous generations presided over. Minorities and women have a better shot at the American dream today in a society where Fareed Zakaria, who was born in Mumbai, India, could someday gain international status as a CNN commentator. But that isn’t the end of it. Boomers have infiltrated every sector of business, culture, science, and the arts with idealism and a will to improve the nation.
We have witnessed inspired thought leadership on television with Oprah Winfrey; in science with Craig Venter and Francis Collins (genome sequencing); and in literature with Pulitzer Prize winners Michael Cunningham (The Hours) and Richard Russo (Empire Falls). The cinematic arts have been elevated by notable directors such as Steven Spielberg and his Oscar-winning movie Schindler’s List and James Cameron and his epic environmental tale entitled Avatar. For over 30 years, the economy has been a beneficiary of Boomer-led companies, from Bill Gates’ Microsoft to Steve Jobs’ Apple.
The Boomer legacy includes more inclusive institutions, myriad technological innovations, an enduring spirit of entrepreneurship, and worldwide media clout. The nation is still imperfect, but still America percolates with opportunities awaiting optimists.
Even though the nation is embroiled in two wars, young males today do not face military conscription upon high school graduation. Even though times are rough economically, hordes graduating from colleges today demonstrate the extent to which their parents have advocated and enabled post-secondary education. Even though traditional American industries are under enormous pressure to change, the nation charges forward with enviable innovation in biotechnology, healthcare, alternative energy, and the Internet.
We may be experiencing difficult times, but our problems run deeper and wider than the actions or non-actions of a single generation. Every generation has fallen short of perfection. Every generation has confronted its own unique challenges. Every generation has helped forge a more perfect union.
Immediately following his interview with Tom Friedman, CNN host Zakaria turned to the final report of his show: death of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who Zakaria lauded for Jobs’ vast business and cultural accomplishments even after overcoming two significant failures: dropping out of college and being fired at Apple.
Zakaria did not mention Jobs’ generational affiliation or how substantially this inventive genius represented signature values of his generation: a determined work ethic, zest for creative self-expression, personal empowerment, transformation, romanticism, anti-authoritarianism, entrepreneurship, and individuality.
These seem like sustainable American values to me.
In a previous post, I argued in favor of Generational Marketing — an approach to brand development that connects products and services to generational nostalgia, merging past with present.
This approach to building brand identity and product awareness has critics. Some believe nostalgia borrows too much attention away from a product: we get caught up in an ad’s nostalgic moments and then ignore or forget the product being promoted. Some insist that nostalgia is focused on the past, and Boomers today are looking ahead: past experiences divert thinking to bygone life chapters that have been read, closed and preferentially forgotten.
My arguments about the efficacy of Generational Marketing in this blog and in my most recent book, Generation Reinvention, are based on social science research and sociological theory. This line of reasoning appeals to critical thinking but possibly does not drive my points home with emotional clarity. In this post I am sharing a few visceral experiences of the past. Consider an advertisement for Coca Cola:
For movie fans among you, does the setting appear vaguely familiar? This portrayal of a nighttime cityscape has not yet happened but rather it is a glimpse into the future: November 2019, to be exact. But wait! The image actually became part of cultural history in 1982 through a Stanley Kubrick movie entitled Blade Runner. And in May 2011 a striking manifestation of this memorable movie moment then emerged through a powerful new art form.
So, is this cinematic moment an image of the past, present or future? Could the power of generationally shared nostalgia give consumers another memorable brand impression, increasing awareness of and consideration for Coca Cola?
Artist Gustaf Mantel has created an extraordinary series of animated GIFs that brings new resonance and emotional endurance to cultural history. Called cinemagraphs, these subtle animations merge the powerful selectivity of still photography with video to portray “something more than a photo but less than a video.”
Now, let me ask you if this copy seems familiar: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” If this statement does not strike a responsive chord, perhaps Mantel's GIF will transport you back to an eerie moment 31 years ago:
What if a contemporary marketer for a brand of blue jeans integrated this memorable image of Jack Nicholson in The Shining with a product message aimed at Boomers — something about the iconic comfort of chic casual blue jeans? Or what might a tennis ball marketer do with such a moving and memorable vignette?
Generational nostalgia can be captured in many ways, especially when marketers merge the newest technologies with shared experiences and an art form that gives new meaning to hard-wired memories.
If a marketer wants to stir up anti-authoritarian feelings in a generation — the sense of being outcast for superficial reasons such as looking old in a youth-oriented society — the marketer might resurrect dialogue from another classic movie: “Hey, man. All we represent to them, man, is somebody who needs a haircut.”
And then the marketer shares this visual reminder of what it felt like to be dismissed during youth for arbitrary reasons:
In a direct mail campaign my team created for Orange Glo International and its OxiClean brand, we transformed a photographic image with nostalgic appeal into a brochure cover — tapping a memory buried in the psyche of almost any Boomer who in childhood took a lingering bubble bath while playing with a favorite toy:
With cinemagraphic technology, we could have expressed our idea in another, perhaps even more memorable way:
“When you have to shoot, shoot, don’t talk.” The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)
Some viewers looking at these moving images will see merely photographs enhanced by motion-capture technology, perhaps experiencing some charming interpretations of bygone times. I see something more. I see potential for product marketers —particularly those employing online media channels — to reach the hearts and minds of a generation with nostalgic moments reinterpreted for contemporary times and products.
This may not have been the primary intention of artist Gustaf Mantel, but his new art form has thought worthy implications for marketers trying to create brand impressions in a much cluttered online world:
In the realm of marketing to adults older than 45, vigorous debates arise about how best to construct advertising messages and frame offers in memorable and compelling ways. Pundit opinions fall into three overlapping theoretical camps.
Some are proponents of “Ageless Marketing” as conceived and articulated by my colleague David Wolfe. Ageless Marketing is “marketing based not on age but on values and universal desires that appeal to people across generational divides. Age-based marketing reduces the reach of brands because of its exclusionary nature. In contrast ageless marketing extends the reach of brands because of its inclusionary focus.”
Some are impassioned about “Life-Stage Marketing,” which understands the consumer from the life-stage they’re experiencing in the present. So, for example, adults between 45 and 55 today have a lot in common such as children in high school or college, the beginning of caregiving for aging parents, accumulation of significant consumer debt, and so forth. Further, stage of life implies psychological priorities. Thus, some argue that middle-age or the “Fall Stage” includes a reduction of material pursuits in favor of accumulating experiences.
And some are committed to “Generational Marketing,” an approach for which I’m a proponent. As I write in my newest book, Generation Reinvention:
“… a generation implies membership in a unique group, bound by common history, which eventually develops similar values, a sense of shared history, and collective ways of interpreting experiences as the group progresses through the life course.
“One way to describe this phenomenon of generational identification is the concept of cohort effect, which sociologist Karl Mannheim wrote about as ‘the taste, outlook, and spirit characteristic of a period or generation.’ He also referred to the notion of zeitgeist, the idea that a generation has a collectively shared sense of its formative historical period.
“Marketers tap into the cohort effect when they remind consumers of cherished events and experiences from the past and connect these acquired memories with brand identity.”
Critics deride Generational Marketing as superficial: feckless attempts to connect nostalgic memories with products. Boomers aren’t invested in their formative years, critics argue, they’re looking ahead. Formative experiences are of little contemporary consequence. What’s done is done.
Aside from my assertion that humans always recall nostalgic moments with enduring and emotionally powerful reflections—and therefore these memories can become potent motivational triggers in contemporary marketing communications—sophisticated new consumer research substantiates the affirming power of nostalgia.
Authors of a multi-continent research study, published by the Association for Psychological Science, determined that feelings of loneliness—emotions such as unhappiness, pessimism, self-blame and depression—reduce perceptions of social support. Loneliness can be alleviated by seeking support from social networks. And here’s the surprising psychological insight: nostalgia, a sentimental longing for the past, increases perceptions of social support. A sense of social connectedness nourishes the soul. Nostalgia functions similar to optimism in maintaining health. Nostalgia, appropriately harnessed, inspires positive feelings, including positive brand associations and affinity. (APS, Vol. 19, #10)
This does not mean that creating an advertising strategy around shared generational experiences is always on target or well-executed. Creative problems begin when brand associations are hackneyed or arbitrary.
Misjudgments sometimes occur when those outside a generational cohort superficially interpret generational experiences. We’ve seen recent ads targeting Boomers that connect brands with peace symbols, classic rock music, and the rebellious spirit of Boomer youth. Once potentially powerful as a creative approach, connecting brands to the spirit of the sixties has been done.
Other marketers create messages where psychic connection between nostalgic memories and a brand have little in common; that is, brand utilities have nothing to do with the creative message.
St. Joseph Aspirin recently launched a TV ad featuring Ken Osmond, the actor who played Eddie Haskell, cheeky friend of Beaver Cleaver in the hit 1950s sitcom, Leave It to Beaver. Significantly, this is the first situation comedy ever written from a child’s viewpoint, thus elevating potential for nostalgic resonance with the children of that time: Leading-Edge Boomers.
Although this ad deserves acknowledgement for resurrecting an actor who is part of Boomer nostalgia in a fairly big way, we are left wondering what Eddie Haskell has to do with headache pain relief. (Maybe the product is a palliative for the headaches Eddie often caused Beaver’s parents, June and Ward.) But brand connections between Eddie and an OTC analgesic are vague. Even minor copy changes could have strengthened ties between Eddie, the obnoxious neighborhood headache, and a popular aspirin brand of the same time. To the credit of this advertisement’s creators, contemporary Eddie helps reposition the brand for what Boomers need today: cardiovascular health. (A note of caution: Ad critiques rarely consider sales or measured changes in brand awareness/preference generated by a campaign, and these performance measures are, indeed, the bottom line in judging marketing effectiveness.)
Successful Generational Marketing requires mastery of nuance and meaning. Linkages between a brand and nostalgic meaning must make sense. Further, all formative life experiences of a generation, from early childhood through young adulthood, have potential for development. Boomers possess a rich repertoire of shared experiences beyond those that occurred between 1967 and 1973. Potential nostalgic motivational triggers go way beyond Woodstock.
Based on thirty years of experience marketing to Boomers, I can affirm with my career and portfolio that Generational Marketing succeeds when executed properly. I have created numerous ad campaigns and promotions, dating back to 1981, that performed by generating sales, memberships, donations, inquiries and leads.
Some argue that Generational Marketing is exclusionary: marketing messages that appeal to a specific generation exclude members of other generations who might not identify with the message or conclude that the product is not for them.
I say, “Welcome to market segmentation.” Target marketing forces choices about who is most likely to buy a product, their common characteristics, and the most potent ways to evoke an emotional connection, to inspire a brand-consumer relationship. These choices force exclusion. As one of my mentors once instructed, “Brent, always make your easiest sales first.” Some of my successes in advertising and marketing correlate with the degree to which my team was effectively exclusionary.
Further, big brand marketers create and target messages to multiple segments for the same brand. When I handled advertising and sales promotions for McDonald’s in Colorado, we executed campaigns targeting young parents, children, Latinos, African Americans, and older customers. Each of these segmented campaigns involved sophisticated messaging that considered cultural and social nuances of the segment. McDonald’s brand meant slightly different things to different segments.
As I have written and instructed in my speeches, Boomers, particularly Leading-Edge Boomers (born between 1946 and 1955) have a sturdy sense of generational identification. This is due to two factors.
First, the Leading-Edge grew up during significant cultural and social upheaval. Karl Mannheim and several social science researchers have confirmed that turmoil in youth strengthens generational identification and durability of formative experiences.
Second, Boomers comprise the only generation to have grown up with just three monolithic television networks. No generation older or younger experienced this convergence of technology with youth. Boomers growing up in Alaska and Florida shared many of the same televised moments and thus learned the same cultural and social messages. We watched Eddie Haskell weekly in dominant generational percentages. We either liked or disliked Eddie, but we all recall his shifty character. This isn’t about the past or future; it’s about who we are: the sum-total of our life experiences.
Nevertheless, as a marketer, I’ve always maintained a full toolbox. The three Boomer marketing approaches discussed here can succeed when well executed. All three approaches can fail when creators have inadequate understanding of the market, message, methodology or meaning conveyed through their ads.
Ageless Marketing can inspire advertising messages that appeal across generational divides because of commonly shared values, such as the nearly universal desire for a cleaner environment. Boomers and their Generation Y children share passion almost equally for greener living and sustainability.
Life-stage Marketing can offer another path to success for those who connect a product or service with a stage need. Many Boomers today need help in understanding their caregiving challenges and responsibilities. This hallmark of their current life-stage predisposes them to offers of caregiving support and education.
And Generational Marketing can create powerful associations between a brand and a segment’s formative experiences. These nostalgic associations can become instant shorthand for positioning a contemporary brand constrained by cluttered media and product/service parity. Nostalgia is rich with opportunities for deeply personal brand interactions.
Those who insist that Generational Marketing is the least effective way to create advertising targeting Boomers may simply not understand this approach at a level of expertise necessary to be successful.
The 2011 LOHAS Forum continued a 16-year tradition by gathering thought leaders and speakers from across the green, sustainability, natural, and organic sectors.
LOHAS is an acronym for Lifestyles of Health & Sustainability, a market segment representing one in five U.S. consumers—those who are passionately focused on health and fitness, the environment, natural and organic products, personal development, sustainable living, and social justice.
This powerhouse conference illuminates the LOHAS market and reveals insights not otherwise accessible. The Forum delivers an organic energy that infuses attendees with deeper comprehension and commitment to values connected with human health and long-term environmental sustainability.
This year during the June 22 – 24 conference, staged at the St. Julien Hotel in Boulder, Colorado, a unifying message from many speakers focused on the urgency of now: a sense that this is the time for bold action to avoid cataclysmic consequences, whether introduced by population growth, climate change or declining oil reserves.
Ted Ning, Executive Director, LOHAS
Their concerns and cautious warnings also became tempered by optimism. Most of the visionaries expressed hopefulness that our species can transcend current threats, leading us toward a healthier, more humanistic future.
Steve French and Gwynne Rogers of the Natural Marketing Institute (NMI) emphasized that the Boomer generation is today’s priority target for those marketing green and natural/organic products.
“The LOHAS market, regardless of market sector or geography, is driven by an older consumer,” said Steve French. “In the U.S. and Western Europe, it’s the Baby Boomers.
“They’re voting with their money as they control the nation’s wealth: $3.2 trillion dollars in spending power. Boomers over-index as LOHAS consumers. They’re the most passionate about sustainable agriculture, protecting the environment, and using renewable energy. Their attitudes translate into behavior as measured by actual product purchases.”
The LOHAS movement continues to be embellished and honored by stalwart consumer brands, with 2011 conference representation from significant companies such as Whole Foods, Silk Milk, Coca Cola, New Belgium Brewery, Mohawk, Ogden Publications, and Patagonia. Yet, opportunities remain for growth of corporate engagement among other leading companies that have driven stakes into the LOHAS market, such as General Electric, Starbuck’s, Wal-Mart, Best-Buy, General Motors, and Johnson & Johnson.
Future LOHAS Forums can host and educate more executives from larger corporations and nonprofits dedicated to health and sustainability consumers. These values-driven stakeholders are the future, and, as NMI research has demonstrated many times, LOHAS consumers are shaping mainstream value consensus.
Here, then, are some of the speakers and thought leaders who attended the 2011 LOHAS Forum, with excerpts from their presentations.
Dr. Jean Houston, Founder, Human Potential Movement
“We are now a geological force not simply a human force. We have changed the shape of the world, right now for worse – soon, as we all wake up, for much, much better. So we are being re-scaled to planetary proportions. And the earth within us gives us the corollary and wisdom to know our place and our tasks in this era of stupendous, stupendous change. And the mutations of present time seem to be asking no less than the immediate transmutation or radical growth of ourselves. I’m addressing you, dear friends, as passionate practitioners of world making.”
Terry Kellogg, CEO, 1% for the Planet
“An amazing thing happened when the film ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ came out. It was just enough in terms of a bump in overall awareness levels and appetite to engage on the part of customers. It totally changed the context in which we were operating. And it made possible all kinds of innovations.”
Chris Kilham, Founder, Medicine Hunter
“This is our time. It’s a time that requires boldness; it’s a time that requires tremendous energy. It’s a time that requires that we throw ourselves into this positive work … this humanity, with the fullness and total capability of everything that we can bring to the table.”
Steve French, Managing Partner, Natural Marketing Institute
“The greenest product you can buy is the one you don’t buy. ‘Shopping our way to sustainability’ is inherently an oxymoronic statement. Almost half the U.S. population is mending and fixing things now. Seven out of ten consumers are really thinking deeper about whether they need to buy the thing that they’re buying.”
Dan Millman, Author, The Peaceful Warrior
“I ended up teaching an approach to living with a peaceful heart, acknowledging that we’re all striving to live with a peaceful heart, but there are times we need a warrior’s spirit. Because it takes courage to live in this world, to love in this world, to raise children in this world, to start a new business in this world. That’s what I mean by the term peaceful warrior: peaceful heart, warrior’s spirit.
“There are only two things we have to do in life: we have to die someday and we have to live until we die. But all the rest we make up based on our choices.”
John Peterson, Founder, Arlington Institute
“Remember the first law of discordianism: convictions cause convicts. Whatever you believe imprisons you. Open yourself up to this amazing time of transition and this amazing new world that we’re moving into. Build this new world; become these new humans.”
Casey Sheanan, CEO, Patagonia
“What is Conscious Leadership? It’s the energy and attitudes you project to others. The words you say can have a positive or negative effect on those around you. Leaders who learn to unlock the power of this can be very effective because they can shift entire organizations very quickly. I believe there is no global transformation possible without personal transformation. It starts with us.”
OTHER NOTABLE LOHAS FORUM THOUGHT LEADERS:
Gwynne Rogers, LOHAS Business Director, Natural Marketing Institute
Michael Besancon, Senior Global VP of Marketing, Purchasing and Distribution, Whole Foods Market
Freddie Ravel, Tune Up to Success
Bryan Welch, Publisher and Editorial Director, Ogden Publications
Theo (Lucifury) Wilson, Poet
John Rook, CEO, SOAP Group
Kim Jordan, CEO & Co-Founder, New Belgium Brewery
Finally, Dr. Jean Houston, the remarkable and articulate founder of the Human Potential Movement, emphasized importance of post-menopausal women to LOHAS, representing 70% to 80% of its stewardship. During a separate interview with me she provided further thoughts about the critical role of Boomer women.
“Among Baby Boomer women I’m seeing a heightened sense of response-ability. They know that they’re going to live much longer lives. There is a rising mythos – that they are part of this larger story and have been given challenges that have never been there before in human history, called the earth herself. A lot of these women have depth, education and sense of purpose and feel profoundly called to make a difference. Many of these Boomer women are rising up, and without fanfare they are taking responsibility.”
All photos in this post: Copyright 2011, Brent Green & Associates, Inc.
An Anthropologist, Ethnobotonist and Daring Adventurer Discovers the Ethnosphere, Realizing High Hopes of a Generation
Wade Davis has been compared to Indiana Jones, the intrepid fictional archeologist brought to life in cinema by co-creators Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. Several linkages ring true. Jones and Davis are both explorers of antiquity; both are audacious globetrotters; both endure monumental physical pain and emotional discomfort in gritty pursuit of extraordinary treasures.
But this is where comparisons fall apart. In Spielberg’s four movies about the colorful swashbuckler, Indiana Jones chases after priceless “hardware artifacts” such as the Crystal Skull of Akator or Ark of the Covenant. Davis pursues “software artifacts” of vanishing cultures; his treasures are language, ritual, social custom, and ancient wisdom.
Brandishing whip and pistol, Jones brutally dispatches evildoers; Davis engages adversaries with pen and oratory. Davis’ quest is not for material riches but for preservation of biological, psychological, cultural, and spiritual diversity—maybe even protection of the Penan of Borneo, Inuit of North America, Moi of New Guinea, and Waorani of Amazon lowlands.
An explorer-in-residence for the National Geographic Society, the Harvard-educated ethnobotonist and anthropologist has invested over 25 years of his career exploring, investigating, describing, photographing, and writing about ancient cultures, native tribes, and flora and fauna in isolated destinations, from Amazonia to the Canadian wilderness. He is an author of nine books, including global bestseller The Serpent and the Rainbow, a spellbinding account of the voodoo culture.
Davis, born in 1953, is aware that his core values reflect the context in which he came of age, and he expresses his awakening into adulthood with a keen sense of history.
“There were major sociological and historical forces converging at the time the Baby Boom Generation was born. Our parents were scions of the Victorian and Edwardian eras where progress was taken as a given, improvement as destiny— the inevitable domination and success of European society.
“Suddenly all of that dies in the blood of Flanders Fields, and we birthed the nihilism of the 20th century. This gave us notions of modernity; this gave us Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Our parents had gone through this incredible upheaval of the spirit—not just The Great Depression and World War II. You can understand their collective exhaustion. We didn’t know about this in our youth.”
What Davis did know, as did many Baby Boomers maturing during the 1960s and 1970s, was that a future characterized by “Happy Housewife” and “Organization Man” would not be manageable. Drawing on his thoughtful love of literary masters, he embraced a precipitating gift of self-awareness early in life. He understood what he did not want, which became a giant first step.
His awakening arrived in the summer of 1968 during a high school field trip to Colombia. As he wrote in Light at the Edge of the World:
“Life was real, visceral, dense with intoxicating possibilities. I learned that summer to have but one operative word in my vocabulary, and that was yes to any experience, any encounter, anything new. Colombia taught me that it was possible to fling oneself upon the benevolence of the world and emerge not only unscathed but transformed. It was a naïve notion, but one that I carried with me for a long time.”
His passion for novelty also originated from dread of an overly manicured life as he witnessed his parents’ resigned acceptance of a predictable, prosaic, and regimented middle-class existence.
“Hemingway said the key to being a writer is to have something important to say,” Davis recalls. “And second he advised writers to first live an interesting life.
“Early on I never had aspirations to be a writer, but I desperately wanted an interesting life because the opposite is a world of conformity and banality. My father called his work ‘the grind.’ I had to escape that, and I think our whole generation felt a need for change.”
Davis recalls critical defining moments shared by many of his peers who began questioning the society proposed to them by their parents.
“Where I came from was like so many of us. I remember turning on my clock radio and listening to The Beatles, particularly ‘A Day in the Life’ from the ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ album and I thought, ‘Wow, there’s got to be another way. This is what works for me.’”
Energized and propelled by his generation’s commanding cultural imperatives, Davis discovered Harvard University, a quixotic hotbed for confrontations between Boomers and the establishment outside academia. In a recent essay on creativity, he reflects upon this time:
“In the summer of my junior year I had a job fighting forest fires and our camps were filled with young American draft dodgers. We were obedient Canadian lads. They by contrast had an irreverence and disdain for authority that was electrifying. One had a copy of Life Magazine with the Harvard student strike of 1969 on the cover. In a raw atavistic way I concluded that this had to be the school to attend. I arrived alone in Boston in the fall of 1971.”
He became opposed to the Vietnam War, investing time and energy to shape public opinion through demonstrating and pamphleteering. A tenacious struggle to end the war exhausted him, and so, like many of his peers, he looked to the wider world for answers to profound questions about war, peace, and humanity’s fundamental nature. He decided to hitchhike into the unknown.
During a moment of spontaneous decision-making while at a café with his Harvard roommate, he pointed to Africa, as depicted on an old National Geographic wall map, as his next destination. Making such an abrupt decision to explore territories near the equator, he sought counsel from a scholar who would become his mentor: Richard Evans Schultes, a Harvard professor widely regarded as the greatest 20th century explorer of the Amazon. After meeting with Schultes, who intuitively embraced this ambitious, idealistic student from Canada, Davis journeyed within a fortnight to the Amazon where he lived with fifteen ethnic groups in eight South American countries while collecting over 6,000 botanical specimens.
The plants, and the wisdom he has reverently accepted from them, have given Davis intimate access to indigenous cultures worldwide and penetrating insights into the cultural equivalent of environmental desecration. Just as modernization is under-girding destruction of the planet’s biodiversity, technological innovation and proliferation are also destroying many of the world’s oldest cultures and languages.
During a speech at the LOHAS Forum, an annual gathering of like-minded professionals and business executives committed to promoting human health and environmental sustainability, Davis made palpable the plausible monochromatic path of humanity’s future:
“When each of you in this room was born, there were 7,000 languages spoken on earth. Now a language isn’t just a body of vocabulary or set of grammatical rules; a language is a flash of the human spirit. It’s a vehicle to which the soul of each particular culture comes into the material world. Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind, a watershed of thought, an ecosystem of social and spiritual possibilities. And of those 7,000 languages spoken the day you were born, today fully half are on their way to extinction.”
Like the planet’s biosphere, the health of which depends on species diversity, humanity’s ethnosphere also depends on diversity for our collective psychological health. Davis defines his neologism as the cultural web that encompasses the diverse dreams, myths, thoughts, products, and intuition of every culture on earth.
Within another generation, humankind will lose the exclusive wisdom, insights, and knowledge of peoples who have carried their traditions from generation to generation with inimitable languages and stories. Analogous to losing a plant species that could have provided a cure for pancreatic cancer, when humanity loses a unique language and primordial wisdom it codifies, we might be losing ways of understanding our mortal existence that could cure mental cancers: war, xenophobia, racism, and existential loneliness.
As Davis cautions in Light at the Edge of the World, “Every view of the world that fades away, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life and reduces the human repertoire of adaptive responses to the common problems that confront us all.”
Davis does not consider it his primary crusade to save indigenous cultures from homogenization and cooptation by the world’s most powerful western and eastern countries. Rather, he views his responsibility as explorer-in-residence for National Geographic to make the rest of us aware of what our species stands to lose when these ancient cultures become absorbed and rendered extinct by dominating ideologies.
His uncommon career elucidates how millions of Boomers have chosen to live outside normal boundaries and typical expectations. He has shifted his own paradigms by taking inordinate risks, not dissimilar from many entrepreneurs, artists, scientists, educators, social activists, scholars, and politicians from the same generation.
In his essay on creativity, he provokes today’s young people with the enlivening possibilities of risk-taking: “If you place yourself in situations where there is no choice but to move forward, no option but success, you create a momentum that in the end propels you to new levels of experience and engagement that would have seemed beyond reach only years before.”
Gathering vivid experiences from around the globe, seeking paths to constant self-improvement, finding creative new ways to express observations and values, Wade Davis’ career stands as a metaphor for the generation in which he was born.
He has experimented and illuminated, tested choices and found grounding, traveled peripatetically and stood motionless to discover subtle and sustainable lessons of biological and cultural variety. And he has taught millions of readers and admirers that mitigation from potential calamities we face as a species may be found through preservation of biological, cultural, and language diversity.
In a journal he carried with him on his first trip to Colombia during the revolutionary summer of 1968, Davis jotted down a promise to himself that became a life credo: risk discomfort and uncertainty for understanding.
This is one providential man’s bequest, and by extrapolation, another gift to the future from a wildly creative, irrepressibly hopeful generation.
Strategic Implications
No individual can represent an entire generation of males, but Wade Davis comes as close as I’ve discovered in representing a totality of values that spring from the formative years for Boomer males, especially those of the leading-edge.
He is accessible and articulate about how Boomer culture propelled him into a most interesting life story. And stories are the key to reaching this generation most effectively. As Wade Davis teaches, it is the stories of the peoples inhabiting this planet that make it polychromatic and rich. Stories teach us about other ways of being outside the technological frameworks of modernity. Davis’ stories can teach marketers more about a generation than numbers or stereotypes or simplification.
A generation is a story, writ large, just like stories of an indigenous culture somewhere in South America. When astute marketers anchor product marketing around this generation’s dynamic narrative, they have an opportunity to achieve unparalleled sales success.
The above profile is an excerpt from Generation Reinvention: How Boomers Today Are Changing Business, Marketing, Aging and the Future. This 279-page book explores a growing body of research, arguments, insights, and speculation over how Boomers are impacting aging and commerce. Implications from my book are monetary and personal, local and international, intergenerational and multicultural. To learn why these conclusions are significant for your work and future, you can get a copy from online book retailers, including Amazon. Thank you for following my blog and, of course, your interest in Generation Reinvention.
“After 40 years of catering to younger consumers, advertisers and media executives are coming to a different realization: older people aren’t so bad, after all.”
So goes the lead to a recent New York Times article about a marketing transformation underway. Suddenly the venerable newspaper has produced an article that unambiguously acknowledges what the marketing industry has been way-too-slow to accept: “older people,” namely Baby Boomers, are too lucrative to ignore even though over 80% of the generation has aged beyond the traditional marketing and media sweet spot of adults 18 to 49.
Halleluiah!
The Times article makes a point that this shift in mainstream thinking among media and advertising agencies is due to two factors: demographics and economics. Not only does the Boomer generation still evoke the metaphor of a “pig in a python” — its dominant population slice — members of this generation have far more to spend on a discretionary basis — 20% more on average in weekly earnings than the coveted 25 – 34 demo.
And older consumers spend on categories once thought the domain of youthful consumers. As TheTimes article insists, “Mature consumers also seem to be spending on categories not traditionally associated with older people. NBC’s study of those people 55 to 64 showed that they spent more than the average consumer on categories like home improvement, large appliances, casual dining and cosmetics.”
Revolutionary!
These are insights and conclusions many of us in the “marketing to Boomers” arena have been writing and speaking about for years — a decade in some instances. For many of us, The Times article comes across with about as much newsworthiness as if the newspaper was trumpeting the importance of segmentation in marketing. We have known with zero uncertainty that Boomers would bring to their aging a new style of lucrative consumerism. Some did not know that The Great Recession would give Boomers a distinctive economic advantage over younger cohorts, but this has happened too.
So, what is important about this article and what is missing?
Robert Dilenschneider, formerly CEO of public relations agency Hill & Knowlton, has written many worthwhile books about business communications. One of his notable books is Power and Influence. He makes a very strong argument that a handful of media in the nation shape and dominate the national conversation. The New York Times serves a unique role in setting the national agenda, as does The Wall Street Journal. When The Times covers a story, the story gains validity, further influencing lesser magazines and newspapers, shaping their choices of topics. Broader media coverage inevitably shapes mainstream thinking.
Indeed, though it has been a long time coming, an article in the Times with a mind-shifting headline — “In Shift, Ads Try to Entice Over-55 Set” — can be construed as definitive breakthrough. Those of us who have been writing, ranting, proselytizing, and prodding media to recognize reality can finally rest: message delivered and received.
And what is missing?
We can expect a business article to make a business argument: dominant demographic size plusdisproportionately higher incomeequalsa market mandating attention. Yet, behind this argument is a larger issue, making money notwithstanding.
The generations over age 45 are inexorably changing aging, so much so, and in such a pervasive and positive manner, that the structure of our culture and social order is becoming something it has never been before. As Dr. Ken Dychtwald, author of Age Wave, has been insisting for over two decades, Boomers don’t just populate life stages, they transform them.
My friend Susan at age 45 had her first healthy twin babies. My friend David started a thriving home healthcare agency several months before turning 60. My friend Lou leads two of the hottest, most progressive rock ‘n’ roll radio stations in Colorado at age 70. And so it goes for the breakdown of what’s normal and expected.
Dr. Bill Thomas, geriatrician and profound thought leader on the future of aging, suggests that aging is its own opportunity for business to consider. “The development of a new perspective on age and aging is both necessary and possible,” writes Dr. Thomas. “Given the importance of aging in our lives, and the impact of aging on our families and society, a new openness and even curiosity about human aging would seem more than warranted. The time has come for our wondrous longevity to emerge from the long shadow cast by the vigor and virtues of youth.”
Boomer demographic dominance and economic might have now become self-evident and mainstream thought, thanks in part to the power of influence embedded in The New York Times. What’s lacking in this discussion is a third pillar of value: that older consumers are more than consumers; that age is more than decline; that an emerging elderhood will change nations.
Older consumers represent an unprecedented human asset worthwhile for business to cultivate, market size and economics notwithstanding. Our collective thoughts and actions as an “age cohort” will create new markets for goods and services while revitalizing others. We will empower brands like never before as brands become associated with maturity, wisdom, judgment, holistic thinking, generativity, longevity and actualization of human potential across the lifespan.
But I suspect it could take another ten years before the marketing and media communities fully grasp transformative implications of an aging society, one that will continue to manifest new dimensions as Generation X and then Generation Y cross that timeworn media delineation between age 49 and 50.
Rather, marketers and media will remain stuck in old arguments and beliefs: that the ultimate value of human existence is exoneration of youth to the exclusion of age. They will grudgingly revise their marketing plans to follow the money, just as The New York Times instructs, but they won’t buy into aging as a value unto itself. Many people inhabiting these fields won’t embrace their own aging because denial runs deep and vigorous, especially in these professions.
Right now the best way to manifest an emerging new sociology of aging and age inclusiveness is to buy stuff they didn’t expect us to buy and engage with media programming they didn’t expect us to consume.
Maybe a bit impatient, we’re not so bad, after all.
Two very different chapters of history occupied my mind recently.
In an interesting TIME magazine article about The Civil War, The Way We Weren’t, author David Von Drehle develops cogent arguments for the idea that this horrific war began five years before Fort Sumter with a massacre of abolitionists in Lawrence, Kansas, in May 1856. People died because they preferred to live in a “free state.” I attended the University of Kansas and did not know this sobering fact about the home of my alma mater. It’s not entirely due to my ignorance.
After the war and until the beginning of the modern civil rights movement, historians and public intellectuals typically packaged the purpose of this war for reasons other than the divide over slavery. According to the opinion of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, for example, this war was a battle for “liberty, property, honor and life.” Slavery became but a footnote if mentioned at all in the years following the war. It is only just now, 150 years after the war officially began at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, that the rationale and true context for the war is becoming fully manifest.
During my weekly radio show Generation Reinvention, I interviewed Rob Kirkpatrick, author of 1969: The Year Everything Changed. Rob has undertaken a scrupulous initiative to document many facets of a year that did, indeed, shape the nation—history he does not personally recall since he was merely two-years-old then.
For example, we discussed the Vietnam War and a deadly battle for control of Ap Bia, a 3,000 foot mountain near the Laotian border. As Rob wrote, this battle would become “a microcosm of the strategic hardships experienced by American forces in Vietnam.”
This became the first significant battle in which American soldiers openly questioned with national news media the strategic wisdom of their commanders in a battle eventually called Hamburger Hill, a raw metaphor for the human carnage, a watershed turning point in popular support of the war. Although the battle was a victory for the US, with 84 fatalities compared to over 600 North Vietnamese deaths, American media and the nation’s antiwar majority started demanding, “What are we fighting for?” This is a question that has resurfaced with every subsequent war in which the US has engaged since Vietnam.
Two very different historical chapters and their contemporary implications emphasize how critical it is that we accurately understand bygone times to avoid repeating mistakes of the past or revising the record, rendering the past mythically rather than in actuality. The Civil War and 1969 are too often misunderstood or misrepresented today.
Rob Kirkpatrick also shares my observations about how marketers sometimes borrow emotionally charged symbols and slogans from popular culture as a way to brand and sell consumer products, a process called co-optation. I wrote about historical revisionism and marketing co-optation in Marketing to Leading-Edge Baby Boomers:
When some media today choose to report about “the sixties,” they often derive background coverage and image positioning from distorted archival reports, thus perpetuating simplistic stereotypes and generalizations as valid truths.
The media, sometimes sympathetic to students and their political demonstrations, chose then, and often still choose, to reflect inaccurately the true context of the era. Media bias has led to distorted reification of Baby Boomers as a construct through persistent presentation of outlandish personalities and the antics of notorious celebrities connected to student demonstrations. Some journalists and news accounts actually encouraged an escalation of militancy, theatrical expression, and a turn toward revolutionary behavior.
Thomas Frank, author of The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism, provides substantial evidence of mobilization of bias in his critique of business and the sixties. He observes that mentioning the sixties and associated images arouses in some “an astonishing amount of rage against what many still imagine to have been an era of cultural treason.”
Although the sixties’ era has been commonly positioned as a time of narcissism and social destructiveness (the popular movie character Austin Powers notwithstanding), on the contrary, most young people in my experience consciously embraced a philosophy of non-violence while opposing the horrific violence of racism, poverty, environmental assaults, and American bombardment of Vietnam.
I write from personal experience to this point: Most Boomers were going about the business of earning college degrees and/or starting careers—albeit sometimes in slow motion because of the social struggles—while playing active roles in grassroots mobilization, and they were motivated by a sense of obligation to others far more than self-gratification.
Another interesting but complex concept has played a role in manufacturing what society now thinks of as “the bad sixties.” This is the theory of co-optation or the tendency of the marketing industry to have quickly embraced the powerful iconographic images and metaphors of young Boomers, transforming them into commercial messages. Thus, the symbols of the social revolution became distilled into come-hither selling images in magazine ads and television commercials; the creative revolutionaries in the advertising industry chose to mimic and mass-produce counterculture so that their corporate clients could cash in on the youth psychographic. The more ardent proponents of this theory even claim that the co-optation process helped to nullify the revolutionary aspects of the counterculture, thereby mollifying its threat to mainstream value consensus.
I believe, at the very least, that co-optation by the marketing industry, my industry, helped to synthesize in society’s collective memory the most superficial, unsavory, cynical, pugnacious images of the antiwar and democratic mobilization movements of the sixties and seventies. Businesses also made money through co-optation, which, by itself, is not necessarily a bad thing. When this commercially manufactured history becomes history, however, many start having a problem with the prevailing official record, as do I.
The Civil War and 1969 have little in common, other than being periods of extreme internal strife within the borders of the nation. Contemporary beliefs about what happened during both historical chapters are amorphous. History has sometimes been revised. Products and brands have been sold following symbol and slogan homogenization.
Consumer marketing sometimes takes hold of the symbols and slogans, decontextualizes and simplifies them, rendering them meaningless beyond positioning goods and services in consumers’ minds. Responsible marketing, in my judgment, begins with respect for the true historical record. Neither consumers nor society wins when we collectively forget or fail to heed the truths and lessons of history.
I believe an optimum intersection exists between historical accuracy and marketing, and, in fact, marketing can be conceived that helps clarify the historical record so more Americans better understand their legacies and moral responsibilities going forward.
When it comes to 1969, and the sixties more broadly, an education about what happened and insights about what these events mean today can commence with Rob Kirkpatrick’s thorough exploration, 1969: The Year Everything Changed.
On Wall Street is an online resource that provides “financial advisors at the largest and most prestigious brokerage firms with the best information and analysis in the industry.” Recently, reporter Elizabeth Wine asked Dr. Joseph Coughlin, director of the MIT AgeLab, four questions about Baby Boomers and how investment firms can better serve this generation.
In addition to directing AgeLab, Dr. Coughlin speaks at conferences, consults with businesses worldwide, and writes a perceptive and informative blog entitled Disruptive Demographics, an apt way to describe the Boomer silver tsunami as a gathering force for business and societal transformation.
As I read his comments, I thought about these questions from my perspective. The financial services industry has much to gain and lose by how it addresses this generation, so several points of view should be helpful. Here are my answers:
You say that advisors must change the way they deal with clients, especially Baby Boomers. Why?
Let’s review some Boomer history. At critical junctures in their economic lives, they have lost faith in financial services providers. Just as Boomers were feeling pressure to become more self-directed in their investing due to diminishing availability of defined benefit (guaranteed) retirement programs, the market took a precipitous crash in October 1987. Just as many Boomers began feeling a sense of financial security due to swelling 401(k) accounts accumulated during the 1990s, the market plunged in 2002 when the Internet bubble burst. Just as they replaced these losses, the market took the harshest plunge since The Great Depression, in 2008. Many peers in my network felt betrayed by their advisors who did not predict these market corrections or manage their portfolios to assure greater diversification and asset protection. It is part of Boomer DNA to distrust authority in the first place, and the financial services industry has reinforced reasons to be suspicious of financial advice. This generation is desperate for prudent and realistic financial counseling, but few major brands have completely restored confidence, although many, such as Charles Schwab and Fidelity Investments, are working to assure this generation that they can depend on cautious financial planning advice in the future.
Boomers are facing a long and winding road on their journey to old-old age. Millions with inadequate retirement resources today need help now just to achieve a modicum of financial security once it becomes impossible for them to work any longer. Twenty years from now, many Boomers will need careful guidance about how to manage remaining assets so they do not outlive them. Some will be seeking ways to leave their financial legacy for children and grandchildren. The journey from today to 20 years from now is the same passage. To me it means “the rest of my life.” I don’t want to cast my fate just to Charlie who may leave the company in two years and then find myself relying on a stranger who only knows me as a set of numbers on a spreadsheet. This is why the financial services industry needs to understand its clients at an institutional level. What I call “humanistic knowledge capture” must become more refined as an art and science.
If retirement as the endless summer vacation is out, what's in?
Frankly, I have never met a Boomer who did not at some level wish to be free of obligatory work constraints. This belief that Boomers reject an “endless summer vacation” is somewhat mythic, even though surveys consistently report that 70 percent and more wish to continue working beyond retirement age. For many Boomers, summer vacation was actually a time to pursue other passions, whether travel or productive learning at summer camp. It wasn’t necessarily unproductive time. Who really wants to face the daily grind for the rest of their life … I mean, really? However, Boomers generally want to remain vital, productive and relevant. This is a generation in which individuals often define themselves by what they do. What they do is who they are. In their “third age,” many Boomers really want freedom: the liberty to make choices. They want avocations as much as vocations. They want to keep learning. Many want to give back through civic engagement. Freedom requires assets to cover the costs of being free from constraints. For the financial services industry, what’s in is “actualization.” How can realistic financial planning help Boomers actualize the best possible future?
Advisors once were authorities. They had secret knowledge and proprietary tools with which to advise and complete investment transactions. Boomers were mostly ignorant of financial planning — an illiterate cohort, as dependent as sick patients on primary care physicians. That, of course, has changed for many. Boomers have learned that those who claim prescient wisdom about financial matters are, in fact, human: flawed in their knowledge and capable of making mistakes in judgment. Boomers have been given keys to the kingdom of financial knowledge with multi-source advice online and sophisticated tools to assess financial decisions. This does not mean that most are now motivated to forego independent advice. Most aren’t. But many have adopted the aphorism made famous by President Ronald Reagan: “Trust but verify.” Self-direction has pervaded our lives and for good reasons. Boomers have questions they may not ask, but advisors need to answer.
“Do my interests come before your self-interest?”
“Will your company be there when I need you … 20 or 30 years from now as your advice impacts me the most?”
Thus, the relationship between an advisor and client can only be truly successful if it is interdependent … not dependent. The relationship must become more consultative and mutually beneficial.
What will these new retirement products look like?
Now that so many Boomers and younger generations face retirement without guaranteed pensions, it’s obvious that the financial services industry has an enormous opportunity to replace this huge gap in retirement security. Immediate annuities have stepped up to the plate, but five percent of the potential market has purchased these investments. Why? Well, for at least three reasons. First, how does it feel to hand an insurance company $300,000.00 to start receiving monthly checks of, say, $1,500.00? You’ve just traded in a fairly handsome nest egg, fully under your control, for the promise of a monthly income that can only defer part of the costs of living. The rest of the deal is a pledge, which leads to the second question. Will your company still be solvent and able to fulfill your commitment in 2040? And, finally, a third question: Will you change the rules of this fiduciary promise mid-stream … to your benefit, not mine? Innovative financial products of the future will address these questions from the client perspective. The financial services industry stands to gain enormous wealth with immediate annuities — or yet-to-be-named future products — and winners in the competitive slug out will be those who understand risk management, not just from a corporate perspective but also from the perspective of those who cast their fate to corporate solvency and longevity 20, 30 and 40 years from now.
ADDENDUM: In July 2011, SunAmerica Financial Services Group / Age Wave / Harris Interactive published a study revealing new attitudes toward retirement that have emerged following a decade of terrorism, war and recession. Some of the emerging Boomer views about retirement, and financial planning for same, have been addressed in my article above, written one month before data collection began by Harris Interactive.
News media have been contemplating implications of the oldest Baby Boomers turning 65 this year. This is a symbolic passage but nevertheless thought worthy. Around 10,000 will reach the milestone daily for the next nineteen years. Never has the nation dealt with population aging of this magnitude.
As critics see it, Boomer aging represents a dark cloud, a generational storm gathering over the social safety net. Detractors employ disquieting language such as “predicament,” “sinking ship,” and “unsustainable.” In Boomer vernacular, you might just call it a bummer.
But the facts speak to a different vision of the future. This generation is proffering unprecedented growth prospects for states and cities that envision and embrace economic development potential.
Since the 2005 White House Conference on Aging, Colorado’s delegates to the decennial forum have been meeting to create a strategic plan and organizational framework for aging called Silverprint Colorado. Their current goals are specific, but their vision is farsighted: to help Colorado become the leading state in the nation to embrace opportunities of an aging population.
Other states are addressing the Boomer aging opportunity by organizing initiatives similar to Silverprint, with civic and business leaders forging creative public and private partnerships to “ride the age wave.” Virginia’s Older Dominion Partnership is noteworthy for its momentum.
I was keynote speaker recently for the The Greater Sarasota Chamber of Commerce, and over 200 business executives and civic leaders crowded into this half-day workshop, eager to understand possibilities. Sarasota is actively retooling its brand and amenities to better accommodate the Boomer age wave, thereby strengthening its position as one of the nation’s most desirable retirement locations. A majority of attendees are also involved either directly or indirectly in nonprofits.
And the timing couldn’t be better. A generation of social and business innovators has matured, reaching a life-stage typically dedicated to creating legacies. According to a recent study by Convio and Edge Research, Boomers on average give $901 to 5.2 charities annually.
Now, consider a macroeconomic perspective. People over age 50 represent 30 percent of the population nationwide, but they own 65 percent of the aggregate net worth of all U.S. households. Boomers earn $2.6 trillion annually to spend on goods and services, far exceeding any other generational cohort. They control $28 trillion of the nation’s assets and will inherit around $10.8 trillion from their parents.
Boomers are ushering in a “golden age” for tourism, community college education, healthcare, biotechnology, retirement housing, pharmaceuticals, entrepreneurialism, aging-in-place technologies, luxury products, philanthropy, civic engagement, financial services, grand parenting, retailing, traditional media, and online businesses. Every one of these high-growth business sectors creates jobs, careers and tax revenues to help all generations prosper. Boomer spending is already producing many new jobs for young people, as anyone working for hotels and resorts can confirm.
Lindsey Ueberroth, President of Preferred Hotel Group, summed it up with her recent comments to the International Luxury Travel Market: “Preferred Hotel Group believes that the travel industry is on the verge of a true golden age. The opportunities to serve the Boomers are vast. We are going to seek out the Boomers. We are going to serve them well and often. And, we are going to share in the growth and prosperity that they will generate. This is a turning point.”
When you investigate business prospects in other sectors, you’ll hear the same refrains: Boomers are the future. They are buying retirement homes, running organic foods businesses, returning to college, and starting up new companies at the rate of 10,000 per month, 16% faster than any other generational group. They are serving as newly elected governors for states across the nation, such as Mary Fallin of Oklahoma, Andrew Cuomo of New York, Susana Martinez of New Mexico, and John Hickenlooper of Colorado.
Contrary to naysayers, this generation is reinventing aging, from business and nonprofit innovation to public policy leadership. This generation presents a menu of extraordinary business and civic opportunities for those who understand the implications and embrace a reasoned and realistic vision of the future.
Brent served as a Colorado at-large delegate to the 2005 White House Conference on Aging, sits on the Silverprint Colorado steering committee, and is author of Generation Reinvention: How Boomers Today Are Changing Business, Marketing, Aging and the Future.
Much has been written and spoken about the 100th birthday of President Ronald Reagan, on February 6, 2011. This anniversary became a time for many to reflect, to think about this president’s legacies and enduring values. Although my father was a firebrand populist Democrat, he shared some of President Reagan’s core beliefs, including love of country and unflinching respect for the principles upon which our nation has been founded: the importance of individual initiative and personal responsibility. And on February 20, 2011, my late father would also have celebrated his 100th birthday, just two weeks after Ronald Reagan. We are losing the GI Generation at the rate of 30,000 per month, so this is an important time to pause and consider their sacrifices and accomplishments. This time my post departs from typical commentary about marketing to Boomers and considers the generation of men that came before us and how their deeply held values also became our values.
Gilbert D. Green
February 20, 1911 — July 20, 2000
My Father’s Lessons
The autumnal prairie was where I began to understand him: vast, open spaces and dry wind cascading through tall grasses and flint hills; railroad tracks piercing sunset, taking him forever away to where he wanted to be; the stoic determination of hardened, heartland people, meticulously vulnerable.
My father.
While walking among grave markers in a cemetery near my home, Dad kept leaning over my shoulder to remind me of his coaching. He asked me to reflect upon his thundering lectures that I had mistakenly interpreted in childhood as nothing more than corrections.
He told me to consider the superiority of dreams and invention over accumulation and wealth. Or gently he nudged me to deepen my perspective of moral rectitude supplanting self-serving gain — the victory in not compromising, that particular power of duty.
Lastly, he required me to grasp the ultimate confrontation with mortality and to possess for myself his stubborn unwillingness to live passively when all the active living had been done ... better not to live at all. Let me go, he said.
My lessons.
There can never be completion when a man’s father dies. The irresolvable conflicts. The lingering unworthiness. The profound gratitude. The ephemeral laughter. These notions survive.
His name was Gilbert Green, a taut, bronzed man with twinkling sky-blue eyes, born in the high plains of western Kansas. He had only one brother who was eighteen months older. The Green brothers were an indomitable team, working their chores and fighting their bullies during an unsympathetic time to grow up, of world wars and economic depression.
He fought his battles well, first during World War II in the South Pacific as a cryptographic technician — a Japanese code breaker — and then later as a career employee for the Federal Housing Administration.
One indelible lesson passed from him to me was intolerance of political gamesmanship and unethical decision-making that often follows. I can see him now, red faced and lit up, pacing the length of his living room, fury spewing over manipulation of laws to serve bureaucrats rather than taxpayers.
Work for yourself, he would caution me. This would be his lifelong dream — to launch a real estate company with his family helping him build an empire. Instead, he punched the federal civil service time-clock for thirty-five years, waking some days with resignation to finish what he had started. He had chosen his path during a time of deprivation; the answer always was unwavering duty to choices.
I remember one day when he took me aside to tell me about a get-rich scheme. It was a period of quickening Baby Boomer fads, with a succession of smash hit products sweeping the nation, from Hula-Hoops to Silly Putty. In the garage he spoke guardedly to me about a popular toy from his childhood that had been lost to history. He then showed me an old wooden top with a metal tip that he had dug out of a forgotten trunk. By wrapping a string just so around the top and then flinging it with exacting wrist action, he could make the top dance with ferocity. Dad saw it as the next big Boomer craze.
Born with the grit and vision of an entrepreneur, he nevertheless did not also have the willingness to take significant financial risks with limited financial holdings. Bringing his spinning top to market would have required considerable venture capital. At odds with the complexities of national new-product marketing, he eventually let the dream whither.
Dad’s after-retirement dreams were of great escapes, where my mother and he might board a silver recreational vehicle and roll into sunset. He wanted nothing fancy or luxurious for himself, just peace of an open road and adventure of another turn. My chronically ill mother dissuaded bold expeditions with her delicate health. He resigned himself instead to fish for bass in Shawnee Lake, floating above his dreams in a silver rowboat.
Smell the roses, son, he often insisted, as he watched me pushing rashly through the years, head pressed to the proverbial grindstone. He had a clear understanding of mortality, the brevity of our days, and even more elusively, those fleeting moments of joy. I always thought this to be an ironic caution from a man who answered the irritating shout of obligation more frequently than the alluring whisper of possibility.
The years passed with him spending many hours in front of the television. Routine had its predictable, tranquillizing effect, but deep within remained lingering, unsatisfied fervor. Every spring he marched into the Kansas state legislature where he fought to protect retired federal employees and their civil service pensions from political capriciousness. In those times when his quick reason and fiery arguments filleted elected thieves, he was never more alive.
As a son searches through the years with only memories to mine, he often uncovers golden nuggets left behind from the man who gave him life. Decades of discussion, telephone calls, and fatherly advice reduce to a few simple aphorisms or an overworked cliché.
Laugh and the world laughs with you; cry and you cry alone, he advised. This was his lesson of perseverance, remembering always that an optimistic outlook and enthusiastic smile can change the day, and on some days change the world.
His health failed for several years, the inexorable spiral from independence to assisted living, from hospitals to a nursing home. A mild heart attack one morning was all he needed to let go of the reins, and in four difficult months, he passed through the final stages of dependency. After two days of labored breathing, he released his last breath as a gasp and then a resigned sigh.
Gilbert Green now marches decisively through prairie fields, an infinite sea of swaying tall grass, a 16-guage shotgun snugly under his left arm. Perhaps Uncle Gary is within reach of his shrill whistle should he stumble upon a covey of quail or launch a prairie chicken into frenetic flight. He strides briskly, a bounce in each step. He is in control of this forever moment — no strings attached to lesser bosses or circumstances that prohibited him from achieving some of his dreams. Perhaps parked in the background sits a rolling silver hotel under my mother’s control, simple but comfortable. He is seeing the world as he did during life: for what it gives rather than what it takes.
Products, especially manufactured goods, have become commoditized by virtue of a plethora of choices available in every consumer category. Walk into a Target store and approach the toothbrush displays to behold hundreds of choices. Saunter over to electronics and find dozens of options for audio headphones.
To help differentiate so many product choices, companies then added services to their offerings. I recently worked out to a sample routine featured on Exercise TV. Before beginning the session, a voice-over announcer offered meal plans and fitness calendars as a bonus if I chose to purchase the complete DVD program series. Thus, a commoditized workout routine expanded value by including knowledge services.
But value-added services have become plentiful, also lacking novelty. We simply expect extras for many of the things we buy today. Whether this involves being picked up at home by a car rental company or receiving lavish attention from knowledgeable clerks at an Apple Computer retail store, we expect service.
That brings us to the experience economy. Pine and Gilmore insist: “Those businesses that relegate themselves to the diminishing world of goods and services will be rendered irrelevant. To avoid this fate, you must learn to stage a rich, compelling experience.”
Pine and Gilmore further offer Las Vegas as a straightforward example of the experience economy in action. “Virtually everything about Las Vegas is a designed experience, from the slot machines at the airport to the gambling casinos that line the Strip, from the themed hotels and restaurants to the singing, circus, and magic shows; and from the Forum Shops mall that recreates ancient Rome to the amusement parks, thrill rides, video arcades, and carnival-style games that attract the twentysomethings and give older parents a reason to bring their kids in tow.”
One additional factor in favor of experience-based marketing involves Boomer consumers at this life stage: they are aging. Most Boomers already own too many possessions accumulated over a lifetime. They own furniture. And audio systems. And televisions. Further, they are not as motivated by basic product appeals or even products enriched with services. They’re looking for something else, something more ephemeral: rich experiences leading to peak experiences, creating enduring memories.
This brings me to a recent New York Times article about the ultimate Boomer experience: Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy Camp.
In Chapter 2 of my most recent book, Generation Reinvention, I propose a compelling argument concerning the centrality of rock music in the lives of Boomers:
British songwriter and performer David Bowie built his renowned career around rock ‘n’ roll. So did Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, Mick Fleetwood, Stevie Nicks, and Phil Collins. It is a thread connecting disparate members of a generation; it ties New Yorkers to Californians and the Dutch to Brits. It is memories and money, idealism and capitalism.
Today rock ‘n’ roll is ushering Baby Boomers into their third age: For many, the beginning of an adventurous new life stage; for others, a long, slow slide downhill. Whatever your view, Boomers mean money—lots of it.
The lede for the Times article makes a similar point:
Long before they became doctors and lawyers or C.E.O.’s and real estate developers, they played in garage bands and maybe even dreamed of becoming rock stars.
Created by David Fishof, a former sports agent who morphed into a rock talent agent, handling luminaries such as former Beatle Ringo Starr, Rock Camp gives participants a week-long journey into music nirvana.
Wannabe rock legends practice side-by-side with an ever-changing cast of celebrities acting as coaches such as Slash of Guns N’ Roses, Jack Bruce of Cream, Roger Daltry of The Who, Steven Tyler of Aerosmith, and even Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones.
After six days of long rehearsals and collaboration with fellow campers, their journey culminates with a concert for friends and family members.
A rancher and amateur drummer from Durango, Colorado, proclaimed, “I’m at a point in my life where I’m going to spend my money on things I’m passionate about, and I’m absolutely crazy about music.” The “things” he is most eager to buy now are transformative experiences. And six days of rock idolatry is a well-considered experience at $10,000.
According to Pine and Gilmore, transformation experiences have four key ingredients:
Entertainment: To a rock idol wannabe, not much is more entertaining than jamming with peers under the tutelage of classic rock legends.
Esthetic: Rock Camp gives participants complete immersion into the lifestyle of rock stars, from grueling hours of practice and rehearsal to recording sessions in legendary studios, to a final coming-out concert.
Escape: Could any experience offer more escape-from-humdrum potential than hanging out and playing music with Roger Daltry or Steven Tyler?
Education: Six days provide only a brief journey into the rock lifestyle, but these students are ready and the teachers who come are the best in the business, so undoubtedly, everyone receives a boost in their skills.
The most powerful marketing campaigns of the future will have core attributes similar to Rock Camp: immersive, cathartic, transformative and potentially life changing.
Martin Diano, founder of Boomer Authority Association, invited several practitioners of Boomer and senior marketing to contribute chapters to an e-book focused on social networking and online marketing. As proposed, this eGuidebook would be entitled: BoomerStrataGEMS™ ── Tools, Technologies & Techniques. It would become “an eGuidebook and resource listing for using social media and digital technology to engage with Baby Boomers and seniors.”
He shared an early draft with us, which I found to be rich with strategies and techniques to reach the 50+ consumer online. I applied some of the book's recommendations immediately in my own work, discovered some viable techniques, then volunteered my contributions, which include the book's introduction and another chapter dedicated to online competitive intelligence gathering.
The Internet provides Boomers with the most potent medium in history to effect change, nearby and far away. Social networks are no longer merely local and temporal but rather global and eternal. We have daily opportunities to influence hundreds, thousands or even millions with a single Tweet, Facebook post, or Linked-In update. One brilliant blog article can transform nations.
The power of these 21st century technologies became clearer to me when watching an extraordinary YouTube video entitled “Where the hell is Matt?” Matt Harding’s contemporary story reminds me of a younger version of me — full of adventure and idealism during college. Like many of us back then, he is a young iconoclast stubbornly intent on making the world better while having a blast doing it.
Matt traveled to 42 countries in 14 months to create a 4-minute, 30-second video showcasing his silly dance. Through the social network he enlisted thousands of strangers to silly-dance with him. Through YouTube he has attracted over 33 million viewers. That’s over 33 million impressions of an uplifting metaphor: a message underscoring we’re fundamentally all the same regardless of nation, race or culture. That’s a Boomer generation coming-of-age theme, flung into hyperspace with a social networking tool that didn’t exist before February 2005.
Boomers are no longer swarming college campuses where many staked their idealistic claims on the future. We’ve grown up and apart, geographically and mentally. Author David B. Wolfe has written about the inexorable influence of aging on adult psychological development. As we age we become more “individuated, introspective and autonomous.” Intrinsic connections to generational peers become misty and diffuse.
This has all begun to transform since Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 while working for the European Particle Physics Laboratory. (Tim is a Boomer born on June 8, 1955 in London, England.) Burgeoning online social networks that have since emerged create new pathways into generational consciousness. The Internet allows legions to reach across geographic boundaries, to find like-minded contemporaries, and to discover universal life themes and passions.
Online social networks offer rich potential for connecting, learning, engaging, and changing the status quo, much as our colleges offered us in youth. The Internet creates the campus experience for us today, a mélange teaming with ideas, insights and camaraderie.
I submit that one critical “why” of building worldwide social networks is to come together, right now. Online and interconnected we can tackle challenges of shared concern: ageism; age discrimination in the workplace; third-age careers; availability of affordable healthcare; viability of social insurance programs such as Social Security and Medicare; and, ultimately, legacies of a generation, whether environmental, technological, or social. We can focus attention on public education for our grandchildren, or saner immigration policies, or more funding for research into “orphan diseases.” We can nurture vanishing art forms such as quilt making or angler’s fly tying. We can raise money to do all this.
It’s through our expanding online networks that we can debate the issues we once deliberated late-at-night in dorm rooms throughout the nation’s college campuses. We can find closeness with contemporaries we’ll never meet face-to-face. We can remain intimate and current with far-flung children and grandchildren and use the network to assure intergenerational transfer of our values. We can organize our thoughts and plan actions through distributed teams. We can link, tweet, and write articulate blog arguments to improve “collective mentalities” around the worth of elders.
We can even bring fame to new artists and thought revolutionaries of the generation, who often herald possibilities before change takes hold in mainstream beliefs and values. Susan Boyle showed us one way in 2009.
Susan, age 48, a church volunteer from lackluster Blackburn, Scotland, became an instant celebrity. The YouTube video of her shocking performance on “Britain’s Got Talent,” the UK version of “American Idol,” has received tens of millions of views. According to Visible Measures, a company that computes viewings of Internet videos, her catalog of online clips has been watched over 310 million times.
But trouncing Simon Cowell, the cynical talent judge, is not the end of this Boomer woman’s remarkable accomplishments. Her debut CD, “I Dreamed a Dream,” sold over 700,000 copies in the United States in one week, becoming the fastest-selling album in British history, soaring to the number one sales position in Canada, New Zealand, Ireland, and Australia. Susan has shattered any arguments that emerging musical talent belongs only to youth. In terms of sales, she smashed the best debut album of The Beatles.
We can still change the world with our creative gifts, making it better, fairer, more inclusive. We can use these networks to connect with many more peers than possible during our college years. We can live beyond our time, influencing social and political evolution long into the future. We can ensure that our forebears move closer to realizing our ideals of peaceful coexistence, a healthy planet … a world less dominated by human suffering.
Graham Nash, the British member of classic rock supergroup, Crosby, Stills & Nash, wrote a politically charged song about the chaotic 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Regardless of the song’s original context, his lyrics ring true through decades:
Though your brother's bound and gagged And they’ve chained him to a chair Won’t you please come to Chicago Just to sing In a land that’s known as freedom How can such a thing be fair Won't you please come to Chicago For the help we can bring We can change the world – Re-arrange the world…
Today we share a world less dominated by traditional media, a world connected through fiber-optics and satellites, a world shrinking into desktop computer monitors and handheld smart phones displaying media channels born of this century: Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Typepad, YouTube, Blogger — websites conceived to draw us together, to engage our passions, to affect how we see ourselves and believe in our possibilities.
And now, more than ever, we have a unique generational challenge to be the change, to re-engage with more mature purpose, to rearrange the world. We have the tools and freedom like we’ve never had them before. The rest is up to us.
Postscript:
Martin Diano is an accomplished practitioner of online social engagement and digital marketing. He founded and built Boomer Authority using most of the techniques and tricks described in the e-book. If you're a student of online marketing, then this teacher has come, commanding one of the most recognizable names in the industry due, in part, to intelligent implimentation of online social networking.
As Martin declares: Launched in April 2009, membership in Boomer Authority™ reached the 1,500 member plateau in November 2010, making it the largest and only global association of its kind, bringing together men and women from 23 countries and from every professional discipline serving and fulfilling the needs of the 50+ Baby Boomer and Senior demographic with a wide array of products and services. Membership is free to qualified professionals. To view other association activities, see a list of members and to join, click Join Boomer Authority™ Association.
50plusboomerlife — Boomer life - travel - fashion - facts and more! This charming blog is written with purpose and passion by Kristine Drake, a native of Norway. I met Kristine at a magazine launch event in Stockholm, and we've remained in touch. Please keep in mind that this articulate and insightful blog is being written by someone who uses English as her second language. You'd never know it unless I told you so. Norway is a magical country, so Kristine's European perspective about life after 50 enriches us all.
Fifty Is The New Forty Since 2007, FiftyIsTheNewForty.com has been a dynamic, trendy go-to destination for savvy and successful 50-something women. Interviews with prominent Boomers, articles, guest blogs and reviews. Fun, funny, informative, and relevant.
Mark Miller's "Hard Times Retirement" Mark Miller, author of "The Hard Times Guide to Retirement Security," is a journalist, author and editor who writes about trends in retirement and aging. He has a special focus on how the Boomer generation is revising its approach to careers, money and lifestyles after age 50.
Mark edits and publishes RetirementRevised.com, featured as one of the best retirement planning sites on the web in the May 2010 issue of "Money" Magazine. He also writes Retire Smart, a syndicated weekly newspaper column and also contributes weekly to Reuters.com.
David Cravit's blog David Cravit is a Vice President at ZoomerMedia Ltd. and has over 30 years’ experience in advertising, marketing and consulting in both Canada and the US. His book "The New Old" (October, 2008, ECW Press and recommended here) details how the Baby Boomers are completely reinventing the process of aging – and the implications for companies, government, and society as a whole.
Silver - Boomer Marketing in Asia Pacific The only strategic business and marketing consultancy focused on 50+ in Asia Pacific, SILVER is helping companies leverage the opportunities presented by the rapidly rising population of ageing consumers throughout Asia Pacific. Founder and CEO Kim Walker is a respected veteran of the communications industry in APAC, with 30 years of business and marketing leadership experience in Australia, Hong Kong, Tokyo and New York. Silver can INFORM with unique research, data and insight reports into the senior market. ADVISE to help companies increase understanding through audit of their ageing-readiness, strategic workshops, training and executive briefings. CONNECT business to the senior market through refined brand positioning plus relevant and targeted communications strategies.
VibrantNation.com VibrantNation.com is the online destination for women 50+, a peer-to-peer information exchange and a place to join in smart conversation with one another. “Inside the Nation” is Vibrant Nation Senior Strategist Carol Orsborn's on-site blog on marketing to the upscale 50+ woman. Carol, co-author of “Boom,” as well as 15 books for and about Boomers, shares her informed opinions from the heart of the demographic.
Entitled to Know Boomers better get ready for a deluge of propaganda about why Social Security and Medicare should not be secure and why these programs must be diminished and privatized. This award-winning blog, sponsored by the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, provides an in-depth resource of breaking news and cogent analysis. You've been paying for these programs since inception of your career; now it's time to learn how as individuals and collectively we can preserve them for all generations.
Baby Boomer Insights Marilynn Mobley, an Atlanta Boomer and PR expert, shares her research-based insights on how to better understand how Boomers think, act, spend and influence others.
Wisdom Worker Solutions For Boomers contemplating the next stage of productive work life, this is an excellent resource for the newest thinking about Encore careers and the future of work in an aging society.
Time Goes By This is the definitive blog to understand what is happening to a generation as it ages. Intelligent. Passionate. Humanistic.
Route 50Plus Produced by the Dutch organization Route 50Plus, this website brings news, knowledge, and information about the fifty-plus population. The Content and links can be found from more than 4000 national and international sources. Topics include fifty-plus marketing, media, new products, services, and trends. Partners of Route 50Plus include Plus Magazine, 50 Plus Beurs, SeniorWeb, Nederland Bureau door Tourisme & Congressen, Omroep MAX, De Telegraaf, MediaPlus, and Booming Experience.
Dr. Bill Thomas Under the leadership of Dr. Bill Thomas, ChangingAging.org seeks to elevate elders and elderhood in our society by taking-to-task the media, government and other interest groups who perpetuate a declinist view of aging.
The Boomer Blog The Boomer Blog captures thoughts, discoveries and growing intelligence of a multi-generational team grapplijng with, reporting on and responding to the barrage of daily research, case histories and news that is rushing to catch up with the fast-moving Boomer generation.
Serene Ambition Serene Ambition is about what Boomers can do, and more importantly, who Boomers can be as they grow older. Blogger Jim Selman is committed to creating a new interpretation or paradigm for the second half of life
The Boomer Chronicles The Boomer Chronicles, an irreverent blog for baby boomers and others, is updated every Monday through Friday, usually several times daily.
Host Rhea is a Boston-based journalist and a Gemini who grew up in a small town in New Jersey. She has written for People magazine and The Boston Globe. She was also managing editor of Harvard University’s newspaper, The Gazette. She wrote the “Jamaica Plain (Boston)” chapter of the book WalkBoston (2003; Appalachian Mountain Club) and started a popular series of Jamaica Plain walking tours in 1996.
LifeTwo LifeTwo is a community-driven life planning and support site for adults who have recognized the speed at which days are passing by. This often begins to happen in-between the mid-30s and the mid-50s. Sometimes this recognition is triggered by a divorce, career change, personal loss or some other significant event and sometimes it is just the calendar hitting 35 or 40. The hosts' goal is to take what otherwise might become a midlife "crisis" and turn it into a positive midlife transition.
BoomerCafé.com BoomerCafé is the only ezine that focuses on the active, youthful lifestyles that boomers pursue. Instead of a brand new edition every week or every month, BoomerCafé is changing all the time, which means there’s often something new to read each time you go online at www.boomercafe.com.
Jean-Paul Tréguer Jean-Paul Tréguer is the author of "50+ Marketing" and founder of Senioragency International, the first and only international marketing and advertising network dedicated to Boomers 50+ and senior consumers.
Dick Stroud Generational and 50+ marketing is taking off in Europe, with no small thanks to the author of newly published "The 50+ Market."
David Wolfe Respected widely for his thought-leading book, "Ageless Marketing," The late David Wolfe established an international reputation for his insights, intellect and original thoughts about the future of aging. This blog carries on ageless marketing traditions in honor of David.
Matt Thornhill Boomer pundit Matt Thornhill has taken new ground with his path-breaking Boomer research. When you need fresh Boomer insights, contact Matt for original research, both online and focus group.
Chuck Nyren Chuck Nyren, author of "Advertising to Baby Boomers," is a seasoned creative director and copywriter with talent to match. Ad agencies absolutely need his counsel about any of their clients planning to target Boomers.
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