ageless marketing: Strategies for Reaching the Hearts & Minds of the New Customer Majority

Citation

Keyes, S. (2005), "ageless marketing: Strategies for Reaching the Hearts & Minds of the New Customer Majority", Journal of Consumer Marketing, Vol. 22 No. 7, pp. 443-444. https://doi.org/10.1108/07363760510631200

ageless marketing, divided into five parts, of three chapters each, presents a compelling charge to marketers, advertisers and salespeople to look at the market in a new light. Beginning with Part I, “An era of new rules”, all the way through and including Part V, “Preparing landing sites for marketing messages”, readers will find new ideas and concepts mixed with classic philosophical quotations that support the new. A delightful twist in format is offering the readers an interlude in the middle of the book and then a later chapter that chronicles five generations of a family. The Erskine family logs give enhanced credibility to all of the author's “seasonal” concepts. Wolfe uses this particular family as a “microcosm of the marketplace” (p. 217). Its members range from ten months to 91 years of age.

Mr Wolfe, with Mr Snyder, insists that marketing is missing the boat without recognizing, addressing, and implementing many ideas he has brought together. For serious marketers, this business book requires thorough reading with attention to, and retention of, the many terms the author creates and uses. It comprehensively includes and builds upon these terms, the most frequently uses of which I list above as keywords. While many may argue that younger consumers pay more attention to advertising and act on it, the new consumer majority becomes larger each day and thus has the potential for greater revenues. Their sheer volume makes appropriate advertising a must.

There is often much‐appreciated connectivity in the book to examples and relationships from past chapters. These serve readers as both a review of major applications and, while the same time, introducing new topics. For one example, in Chapter 12, where the discussion of the “marketer as a healer” arises, the author takes readers back only one chapter, to Chapter 11, where he cited the success of a Trappist monk, Abbot Joseph, for the importance of story telling. Another example of connectivity is in the “Conclusion” to Chapter 13. Here, when discussing the importance of symbols and avoidance of “anti‐being experience symbols”, Wolf and Snyder take readers back to Figure 7.1 that delineates the seasons of life in matrix form.

The authors begin, and continue throughout the book, by stressing the importance of developmental psychology, “a field almost completely ignored in consumer research” (p. 37). They call on marketers to understand the relationships of related fields to current marketing needs. They spend a good deal of time providing an understanding the roles of the right and left brain. Their major contention states that we can no longer target markets by chronological age and by the statistics we gather from questionnaires. The first challenge presented is the “extraordinary population shrinkage taking place in the historically‐most‐important age group in the consumer economy – adults from 25 to 44. The grim outcome of this is a total absence of sales growth in this age group throughout this decade” (p. 331).

To meet the new demands of “ageless marketing,” we need to understand fully the three “Experiential stages of adult life”:

1. 1.

   possession experiences of the earlier years;

2. 2.

   catered experiences of the mid years, or “the first stage of being someone versus becoming someone”; and

3. 3.

   Being experiences of the later seasons of life (p. 242).

The authors go on and quote Peter Kim, who said:

As Americans redefine what it means to grow old, age, in many ways, will become an obsolete marketing concept (p. 243).

Instead of putting our beliefs into focus group outcomes and questionnaire results exclusively, we must look at the life span as two halves, under and over age 40. Wolfe includes comments for and against focus groups and suggests times to have panelists record their thoughts rather than speaking aloud to influence one another's responses.

A major problem Wolfe deals with is that the often, and incorrectly, sympathetic symbols and words addressing the senior market, those in the “winter season” of life, are offensive and, equally important, probably causing companies to lose business. He gives examples of people, who probably think they are being courteous, without request take the arm of the elderly to help them walk.

There is grave concern about advertising and marketing people, who are still in their first halves of life, having responsibility to create messages targeting those in later seasons of life without yet having had the personal experience of the second half of life. Thus, there is an urgent and immediate need to correct the many inappropriate ads targeting people in the fall and winter life stages. These messages convey a lack of awareness of things in which seniors are still interested in, such as excitement and sex, to name only two. The author suggests such creators have coaching and guidance from those in the “winter” stages.

Offensive advertising and marketing to those in the second half cannot continue with the rapid growth of the “fall and winter” markets. Values of members in each season accompany this discussion. Unchanging values mold the behaviors and actions of most consumers.

An emerging segment Wolfe feels marketers overlook, because of current and inappropriate segmentation precepts, is comprised of another unaddressed group: those who have wound up in different circumstances, such as divorced people, single people who have always been single, and others out of the anticipated molds.

Wolfe faults corporations for being more concerned with moving product than for understanding their customers. He does give examples of companies that have been unusual in their successful customer recognition programs, such as Southwest Airlines. He and Robert Snyder have worked in community development and “senior” housing. They get to the crux of the matter by pointing out that most senior developments advertise golf courses and other amenities that presume those in the winter season of life either place strong value on these amenities or have no other values they treasure and want to use in their retirement. Promotions inappropriately and regularly show pictures of a senior couple walking hand in hand with “pasted smiles” on their faces.

In this section, Wolfe provides many enjoyable ways in which he has listened to, and then accommodated, consumers. He even continues by advising the best practices for attracting people in different seasons of life at the same time to the same property, rather than limiting the property to seniors. He provides photos of collateral publicity he and his clients used to coax the younger segment to share events in one formerly senior‐only housing complex. Later, he concludes that in “over 400 communities, representing over 600,000 homes, no developer client was ever sued” (p. 303). They maintained dialogs with residents by invoking what they called “the four Cs – communicate constantly with candor and control”. Until then many people had stereotypical images of housing especially for seniors. This practice of listening to, and talking with, consumers of various life seasons, and his amalgamation of the members of the Spring stage of the life cycle with the Winter stage people, is one way Wolfe addresses the questioned ability of marketing to bring various groups together.

Wolfe is consistent with his argument against restricting market knowledge to numbers when he says that customer relationship management (CRM) has not worked. He talks in the opening chapter, with a sub‐heading of “Why marketing stopped working”, of the “dehumanization of customer experiences with a company” (p. 7). There needs to be a way to learn about customers, especially the ever‐growing customer majority, which mostly the boomers comprise. To do this, we must consider that people are in four seasons of life, beginning with spring. We must understand what values exist in each season and how the members of that group relate to the corresponding season.

The end of “ageless marketing” directs attention to the ever‐growing consumer majority, the “seniors.” Wolfe identifies symbols, nomenclature, and terms that this huge group of winter people (seniors) like and dislike. To use better terminology is imperative. These negative symbols repel people from advertising. At one time, Wolfe asked a 66‐year old to review a stack of brochures from extended service communities. These brochures opened with a promise to people that they would remain independent. After one paragraph, the brochures told everything about what the property would offer to keep people from being independent; i.e. how they are going to feed you, clean your apartment, launder your linens, bus you to where you want to go, and, with a social director, decide what you will do each day.

The book provides additional knowledge to marketers of the state of the five senses during aging. Anyone committed to getting a 360‐degree view of customers in their 50s and older needs to be aware of these changes because they can influence product design, marketing, sales, point‐of‐sale environments, and post‐sale servicing (pp. 305‐306). Marketers must address these issues. He wants to know why companies put so much effort and money into package design and yet pay no attention to whether or not seniors have the strength with which to open the packages.

Before the appendix, which defines the research that went into this book, the author concludes by repeating his objective was to provide “for the first time in a business book” (p. 332) the integration of psychology with marketing and more. The legacy Wolfe wants to leave readers with by the end of the book is a much greater understanding of self, those around us, and, in fact, the “Family of man”.

This book is a “must read” for those in marketing, advertising, publicity, and sales. It could be a “light read” for seniors and those interested in segmentation. Wolfe accomplished his objective with me, and I implore those involved in marketing and related fields to carry on to the end of this book. It is a slow read of changes requiring high speed.