"In Some Ways All Men Are Alike"

My February 25^th post promised a continuation of my discussion of developmental psychologist David Gutmann’s book, Reclaimed Powers: Men and Women in Later Life. In the meantime, I posted a brief entry concerning the fall from favor being suffered by Milton Friedman’s famous idea about the only social responsibility of a company is to lawfully make profits for shareholders.

So much to ruminate on these days. So much to write about. Oh well, this post gets me back on track.

Over many years, Gutmann’s research has clearly supported a proposition I’ve been promoting for several decades: there is much about the behavior of people in the second half of life (second half marked as starting at age 40) that has not changed in thousands of years.

As a society, it seems we’ve become so accustomed to shaping our perceptions around the superficial things that we’ve all but totally lost sight of the more decisive and defining dimensions of human behavior at all ages. But, I argue, to gain deep understanding of consumer behavior, one must – I repeat must – dive down deep in the human psyche and take measure of where we are all pretty much like everyone else near our age.

Gutmann shaped his research around an insightful construct framed by psychologist Ralph Linton in 1945. Linton said, “In some ways each man is like all men; in some ways each man is like some other men; and in some ways each man is like no other men.”

Marketing largely revolves around the middle part of Linton’s three-legged stool: in some ways each man is like some other man. Consumer segmentation is about sorting out who is most like whom. Very little attention is spent in trying to figure out the first leg of Linton’s conceptual stool.

Gutmann went about identifying behavioral traits in the second half of life that are common to all humans – in other words, behavioral traits that cannot be attributed to culture or life experience.

The Northwestern University psychologist focused on four distinctly different ethnic groups in his search for universal behavioral traits among people over 40: Navajo, Highland Maya (Guatemala), Druze (Islamic) and Kansas City residents. He supplements his research with information derived from studies of other cultures by anthropologists and other psychologists.

Notwithstanding the claims of many that boomers are aging differently than members of any previous generation, Gutmann’s many years of research indicate otherwise. Yes, boomers style of need satisfaction is different from the style of need satisfaction employed by their parents at comparable ages. However, in some ways – ways that hold consequential significance in marketing – aging boomers are like all aging people. I’ll get into some of those ways in my next post.

Comments

[joared]

Looking fwd to your cont. posts on this subject. Will be interesting to read how the Boomers are like all other aging people and where the differences are. Wonder if marketers are just trying to focus on the differences of Boomers, or if they truly think, as many Boomers seem to, that they are just plain aging differently?