Immersion Active presents Ageless Marketing

Marketers Need to Come to Terms with the First Task of Aging

From today’s Wall Street Journal article, “Wrinkle Treatments Don't Age Well,” by Rhonda Rundle on page D-6:

“Botox injections help lift the upper face, and dermal fillers such as Restylane plump up sunken areas around the cheeks and chin. Cosmetic doctors say demand for these antiaging injectables is booming, especially among people in their 30s and 40s who aren't ready for a surgical facelift. But the benefits of such injections typically fade within four to six months.”

Carl Jung cited “Coming to terms with aging and dying” as the first of seven tasks of successful aging. 

Few people in their 30s and 40s have yet taken on that task. So to most of them, aging is the enemy. It is the grim reaper of the narcissistic self in the fullness of youth. This is why the boom in anti-aging remedies from shots and tucks to herbal nostrums and skin creams revolves around the still young.

People in their 50s and older typically want to look good but their tight embrace of authenticity keeps most of them from being unauthentic about their age. They are who they are, thinned pates, lined faces, expanded girths and all. Once again, this is why Dove’s reality marketing has scored bigtime.

One of the greatest insults to older people is to tell them that your product will help them feel young. What does young feel like? Al Oerter told me the year he turned 63 when I asked him if he’d like to be 35 again, “Hell no. Not for anything. Life was much harder then."

I just read Tom Peters’ Sep. 23 post on his blog, entitled “Around the World in Eighty Days.” Tom recited a litany of speaking assignments coming up throughout the fall: (they) include these ports of call: Dubai/UAE, Campinas/Brazil, Belo Horizonte/Brazil, Nashville TN, Moscow, Orlando, London, Berlin, Bologna/Italy, Seattle, Sydney/Australia, Taipei/Taiwan,* Birmingham/England, Durango CO, Chicago, Lagos/Nigeria, Port Harcourt/Nigeria, San Antonio, Bucharest/Romania.

Should anyone doubt that the peripatetic Tom Peters at 62 is any less energetic that the snorting young bull he was at 32? Is Tom staying young? No. He’s just not getting older. He’s the epitome of John Barrymore’s immortal wisdom, “A man is never old until regrets take the place of dreams.

Ego sum erat. “I am where you will be,” I sometimes tell young people in marketing. But unless someone has made an effort to show them life as seen through a lens polished by six, seven or more decades of life, those young marketeers don’t really know where I am. Or who I am. Or what I think and don’t think. They need the guidance of more seasoned minds to figure that out. But how many marketing agencies commit time and resources to training the young among their staffs on how to market to the over-40 crowd?

Marketing client companies have no idea of how much money is wasted by marketing agencies that don’t have staff that is firmly grounded in what it takes to be successful in older markets. Believe me, the wasted sums run into the billions when agencies use trial and error as a substitute for grounded knowledge. And BTW, the knowledge I’m talking about runs deeper than the shallow pits of conscious mind disclosures made by consumers in conventional consumer research.

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 I won’t have any new posts until next week as I’m headed off to give a talk on marketing to older markets at Viva 50+, an international conference on aging being held in St. Gallen, Switzerland.

Hidden Sources of Young Consumers' Behavior in Today's Marketplace

A curious development I have written much about is how the New Customer Majority – people 40 and older – is having a strong influence on teen and young adult consumers.

The curiousness of the phenomenon is not that it’s happening but that so few in marketing know about it.

If you compare Abraham Maslow’s descriptions of the behavioral traits of people in advanced states of personality development with what recent trends reports say about consumer behavior in general, you’ll see significant similarity.

It may seem ironic – given our long infatuation with youth – but you can gain a deeper understanding of today’s young consumers by studying the behavior of people in the second half of life. Why? Because the majority rules in the marketplace as well as in politics.

But significant differences exist between young and older in how the former express the behavioral traits of midlife. For example, facing their mortality more sharply than before, people in midlife tend to experience rising interest in spirituality. More specifically, they become more sharply focused on the meaning of life. Today’s interest in spirituality among – unprecedented by many measures – finds expression more in the formation of identity than in the search for the meaning of one’s life.

In the last post I talked about the rising influence of androgeny on younger males – a phenom called metrosexuality. Carl Jung wrote extensively on how androgeny emerges in midlife. It stems from one’s integration of the characteristic of the opposite gender into behavior.

But androgeny is expressed differently by young people than it is expressed among middle aged and older people. Among the young it rests on the narcissistic foundations that drive self-focused lifestyles in the more materialistic world of the young. They have yet to ask themselves the perennial midlife question, “Is this all there is?” Androgeny among people in more advanced states of maturation reflects a stronger others-centered focus involving what Erik Erikson called generativity. He coined the term to describe the shift in worldview from self-centeredness to others-centeredness.

Our increasingly androgynous culture increasingly blurs gender distinctions, starting with physical appearance. Males sport body piercings and females proudly wear tattoos. Behaviorally, males have become less assertive by enfolding into their behavior roles that were formerly marked as feminine roles. Females have moved in the opposite direction by enfolding into their behavior roles formerly marked as masculine.

Many rejoice at these changes. They champion them as progress in human freedom. And I concur that they stand as progress. But I would argue that this progress owes not a little to the majority status of people who are in the years of life when androgynous behavior becomes more prevalent.

Thus it is that we are moving toward becoming an a more ageless, less gender conscious society and an increasingly less materialistic and more experiential culture. Most of this is happening outside the fields of general awareness. However, everyone in marketing stands to benefit from a deeper understanding of what’s involved.

I’ll close with this thought:

“Most of our decisions, actions, and behavior depends on the 95 percent of brain activity that goes on beyond our conscious awareness.”

“Mysteries of the Mind,” U.S. News & World Report, Feb. 28, 2005.

So, it just makes plain good sense to learn more about the subliminal influences that are at work in that 95 percent zone about which consumers can tell you nothing even though in it lies the foundations of all their behavior.

 

The Origins of Metrosexuality

So what about Carl Jung’s idea that we’re all connected in what he called the collective unconscious? (By the way, you might want to check out James Surowiecki’s Wisdom of Crowds in which he documents amazing cases of the collective judgment of groups of people who are not experts in a matter outperforming the judgments of experts. His book could be read as supporting the Jungian idea of a collective unconscious.)

Some time ago I posted a piece related to the idea of a collective unconscious. It was about what I call the psychological center of gravity (PCG). 

The PCG hypothesis holds that people within five years of the adult media age (which is now 45) have a disproportionate influence on culture. The hypothesis presupposes that via the subliminal connections that bind us together as one, we often move in behavioral directions thinking we have moved thusly of our own free will when it has been the collective unconscious nudging us into those directions.

With the bookends of today’s PCG being ages 40 and 50, our culture at-large definitively reflects values and behavior that have long been associated with midlife by developmental psychologists.

Have you wondered where the metrosexual movement started? I believe that it is a function of the aging of society.

Just in case you’ve recently returned from Mars and are unclear clear about what the term metrosexual means, it refers to an urban male of any sexual orientation who has a strong aesthetic sense that reflects a feminine bias and spends a great deal of time and money on his appearance and lifestyle.

Metrosexuality become a cultural phenom in the 1990s when for the first time in history the majority of adults were in midlife or older. A classic tenet among students of adult development is that with the onset of midlife, people tend to become more androgynous. Jung described this as a reflection of men coming to terms with the feminine (anima) side of their self, and women coming to terms with the masculine (animus) side of their self.

Yesterday’s Washington Post carried a story about lifestyles among Japanese men headlined, “Men in Land of Samurai Find Their Feminine Side” It was subtitled “Marketing Fosters Shift in Gender Roles.” Bzzzz. Wrong. The Japanese PCG ranges from around 45 to 55. Marketing had nothing to do with starting this trend. Its origins lie in the androgynous worldviews and values that emerge in midlife. The pervasiveness of this trend reflects the middle age PCG effect on Japanese of all ages.

Last May, the Wall Street Journal ran a story, “Asia’s Lipstick Lads.” It told of a new, booming business in cosmetics for men. We have yet to experience a similar boom here in the States, but signs of its birthing are becoming more evident.

So, once again I posit (I’ve done it in earlier posts) that if marketers knew more about personality development across the four seasons of life, they could better anticipate such trends as metrosexuality (which is a narcissistic expression of the midlife bent toward androgeny) and the conflicting trend toward rejection of artificial means of covering up age in the second half of life.

Why are we seeing these conflicting trends?

More…

The Transformation of the Middle Age Self

The Japanese have no word for “self.” In fact, no society whose written language is ideographic as opposed to phonetic has a word for “self” in the Western sense of the word.

“How can that be,” you ask.

Western minds parse reality in bits and pieces, like the words in this sentence can be parsed in letters, syllables and parts of speech. Eastern minds see everything all of a piece. Speakers of ideographic languages have no word for “self” because unlike in Western cultures, self cannot be grasped as an independent concept.

To Eastern mind, self is like the facet of a diamond: it cannot be removed from its host.

Carl Jung’s concept of self bears similarities to the Eastern concept of self. He believed that each self – yours, mine and everyone else’s – is connected not only to all other selves alive, but also to all other selves that ever lived. He referred to this connection as “the collective unconscious.”

Western egos for the most part give Jung’s conception of the total self little attention. In fact, it sounds to fanciful for most people to buy into. A bit to New Agey, if you will.

But I’m solidly convinced that the Eastern concept of self along, with the Jungian version, is reality. And speaking of reality, the emergence of reality marketing, as pioneered by Dove personal products, reflects the middle aging of the collective unconscious.

Take a look at the four seasons of life in the adjacent chart (click on to enlarge). You will see that the narrative theme in life during Fall – the middle years of life – is reality. The fantasy themes of Spring have gone poof! like a ripened dandelion blossom. The romantic, heroic themes of Summer that spawn idealized images of life have been grown barren. Now -- in the Fall of life – comes the wake up call of Reality – as in real.

Teens talk about being real but we all know they live in a world of fantasy. Young adults often claim,“I don’t play games; I just say things as I see them,” but they unrelentingly play games and mask feelings. This is a necessary vice in summer. It's motivated by the need to projectenough appeal to land intimate partners and impress “old timers” at the office that one is on the ball, and destined to rise far.

Playing games and effecting artifice is a necessary part of being young and is the source of narcissistic values and behavior. It’s all about becoming someone. But comes Fall, the time arrives for self-centered narcissistic values in ones life to dissolve. Displacing them are other-centered values – what Erik Erikson termed generativity values. In the Summer of life we bring forth the next generation; in the Fall of life we nurture its members and prepare them for seasoned adult roles.

It is this shift from self-centeredness to others-centeredness that accounts for the “surprising” decline in the infamous selfish of boomers. For sometime we’ve heard that boomers – the Me generation – would remain as self-absorbed as ever as they moved into old age. That is proving wrong (generally speaking). It is from this shift in life focus that reality marketing has drawn its first breaths – and why middle agers like London Times Journalist Janice Turner (see the last post) are growing tired of marketing messages that project unrealistic on idealizations of reality.

More....

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The Decline and Fall of a Narcissistic Culture

London Times Journalist Janice Turner told us in the previous post, “Without even trying I have acquired a huge mental database about how to postpone ageing. I suppose I just absorbed the anti-ageing babble in our culture that is getting louder and more insistent. To grow old is not now a natural and inevitable process but a symptom of personal neglect.”

Is she right? Have we, as members of the only species whose members can contemplate their aging (as far as we know), made fighting aging an obsession?

I think not. At least not all of us. Yes, some people feel that way. But obsession with anti-aging is no where stronger than among companies looking to cash in on aging boomers’ fear of becoming sexless, hairless and mindless before they expire.

Truth be told, the narcissism that companies count on to sell zillions of dollars of anti-agent nostrums is not as omnipresent as they think.

One of Jung’s seven tasks of aging is “Letting go of the ego.” This is a requirement to reach the pinnacles of psychological maturity. Maslow saw matters the same way. In fact, it’s a classic tenet among students of human development that the ego recedes at the highest levels of maturation.

A retiring ego dissipates the narcissistic urges that appropriately dominate the passions and aspirations of the young, but appear as unseemly among older people as cargo shorts and skirts above the knees.

Of course, no few older people, having drunk the Kool Aid of Madison Avenue shrink in fear of the next age-onset furrow in their face. But most older people become accustomed to their face whatever shows up in it to mark the passage of time as the years move on.

Interestingly, the long anticipated boom in cosmetic surgery that was supposed to develop as boomers reached the long shadow of old age is underway, but driven more by twenty and thirty year olds than by people fifty and older. Boomers by and large are turning out to be a lot less self-centered, not as insistent instant gratification as they once were and less insanely fearful of old age.

As a marketer all this myth-weaving about boomers drives me nuts. Boomers are moving down the same pathways to higher states of human beingness that their parents traveled and before them, there grandparents. The play is always the same; only the actors change.

Aging boomers’ lifestyles differ from those of their parents, but that is primarily because boomers have many more options and ubiquitous mass communications to alter their consciousness of the world. But underlying that are the same basic needs and the same basic worldviews.

Some people have told me that they are tired of hearing about Dove soaps reality marketing which finds beauty in age, in less than perfect faces and in bodies that Slim Fast loves. But Dove’s marketers have awakened to a reality that consumer product companies should take to heart: an aging population is moving popular culture off its youthful foundations. The narcissism of the collective unconscious is melting away as the collective ego moves into recession.

More….

 

Anti-anti-aging Thoughts

Reader Stefan Liute, Strategy Director of Grapefruit sent me the URL to an interesting article in  the London Times. 

We that are left won't grow old...
Janice Turner

WITHOUT EVEN trying I have acquired a huge mental database about how to postpone ageing. I buy stupidly expensive face creams for a woman who regards herself as a beauty industry cynic because, well, what if they do work? I’m not brave or blithe or beautiful enough to risk it. I could recite you the ten “super foods”. I eat five of them for breakfast in a self-concocted muesli, easily mistaken for Sainsbury’s Harry Hamster mix and guaranteeing the utmost lavatorial urgency.

So it’s yoga for flexibility and “core” body strength, running to soup up that flagging mid-life metabolism and prevent bones crumbling to dust. How did I accumulate all this dreary knowledge? I suppose I just absorbed the anti-ageing babble in our culture that is getting louder and more insistent. To grow old is not now a natural and inevitable process but a symptom of personal neglect. Read more...

I'll comment on the article and what it is emblematic of in my next post. Stay tuned, because I'll present a bundle of thought that anticipates huge changes in marketing personal products and services.

The Wisdom of Bill Bernbach

Despite access to more customer information than ever before product messages are clicking less often with customers. The inescapable truth is we know less about customers than we should, given the $6 billion a year companies spend trying to figure out what makes them tick.

Bill Bernbach, one of advertising’s greatest minds, would understand the problem:

“Human nature hasn’t changed for a million years. It won’t even change in the next million years. Only the superficial things have changed. It is fashionable to talk about the changing man. A communicator must be concerned with the unchanging man – what compulsions drive him, what instincts dominate his every action, even though his language too often camouflages what really motivates him.”

Bernbach was not a psychologist, but had an uncanny intuitive grasp of human behavior. While most of us may lack the intuitive competence of Bernbach, we can get to know our customers better by acquiring a deeper understanding of unchanging man. But we cannot get that understanding through traditional customer research.

Renown brain scientist Richard Restak has observed that "We have reason to doubt that full awareness of our motives, drives, and other mental activities may be possible." Cognitive scientists tell us that with the aid of new brain canning technology, they’ve learned that about 95 percent of the mental activity going into our decision-making takes place behind the curtains of consciousness. Yet, most consumer research concentrates exclusively on the contents of consumers’ conscious minds.

The roots of motivations lie beyond the knowing reach of our conscious minds. When people tell researchers’ why they do what they do, they can only speak to what appears on the screens of their conscious minds. Those images are often at odds with their more primal sources of motivations.

Marketing mostly ignores the silent 95 percent zone in the brain. Why? The “superficial things” that show up in the conscious mind are more visible, measurable and quantifiable. Companies feel more comfortable with the measurable, so they spend vast sums researching customers’ superficial attributes. Procter & Gamble alone conducts 4,000 to 5,000 customer studies a year.

It’s harder to quantify “what compulsions drive customers, what instincts dominate their every action.” To fathom the unchanging man requires understanding behavior at its roots in human biology.

Ever wonder how cravings develop? Be they for sex or chocolate, they are not consciously created. It’s 3:30 PM. Your energy is sagging. A small organ over your kidneys senses a sugar shortage and sets off a flow of neuropeptide Y to alert your brain of a need for carbs. The plea reaches your conscious mind as a craving for chocolate. You ponder whether to stick to your diet or give in, then say to yourself, “What the hell,” pop a piece of Godiva in your mouth and resolve to eat salad for dinner. You enjoy the moment by giving into the craving.

While you exercised free will (hopefully!) in reacting to the craving, the action you took had its roots in your biology. So it is with behavior in general. That’s lesson #1 in understanding unchanging man.

The Great Watermelon Con

You can always on at least one childhood scene being replayed at gatherings of large families like mine with six offspring. Some stories are endlessly replayed – like the famous watermelon seed story.

Sabrina, my oldest, was seven at the time. Laura, the next oldest was five. As typical of siblings close in age, Sabrina and Laura spent a lot of energy in rivalry. One hot summer afternoon, I sent them outside from our unairconditioned house with cold slices of watermelon to refresh themselves. After awhile I went out to check on them and found Laura doing the strangest thing. She was spitting out the red succulent watermelon flesh and eating the seeds. Her older sister had told her that the good part was the seeds.

Marketing has been a lot like that. For many decades, companies have pushed products into the marketplace with messages telling consumers what the best parts of their products are, and often not fully truthful. Like Laura, who eventually grew older and smart enough to not believe everything her sister told her, the consumer population has by and large gotten beyond having the blind faith in what marketers tell them that they once had.

An older, more educated and more experienced consumer population has seen every pitch under the sun. They know the gap between reality and advertising is often vast. Perhaps that’s why the reality genre that has developed in television programming has seeping into the world of advertising. It started with Unilever’s Dove products marketing. Nike recently followed with its high profile “big butts, thunder thighs and tomboy knees” campaign.

Faux is out. Authenticity is in. Should this a surprise? Not to anyone who has read Abraham Maslow, Carl Jung and other luminary students of human development in the second half of life.

It amazes me how little the marketing community realizes that the annals of adult development are loaded with information that provides more and deeper insight into the behavior of people 40 and older than can ever be mined from focus groups and surveys.

For all that has been said about how different boomers are, the truth is that their needs are much the same as their parents’ needs were at the same age. Boomers differ only in how they satisfy their needs because they have more options than their parents had. Remember, when Maslow formulated his famous hierarchy of basic human needs, he never said that they applied to everyone except boomers. Similarly, Erik Erikson never said that boomers develop according to a different schedule of personality development than the eight-stage model followed by everyone else.

We marketers would do well to keep in mind the fact that the play is always the same; only the actors change.

The Self-Actualizing Corporation

I’ve been working on our new book, Firms of Endearment over the Labor Day weekend, writing about concinnity. After learning what it meant many years ago, I dreamed of bringing it back into common usage, I so loved what it stands for. A little bit of the results of my authorship this weekend:

Concinnity is an ancient English noun, little used today. Perhaps that’s a sign of the times we live in. Impatience for getting to the “bottom line” or to “the point” lessens sensitivity to concinnity. Refined attention necessary to achieve concinnity is less than routine in a society that parses reality on the air in 30-second (or less) sound bites.

Concinnity means, “a skillful blending of the parts achieving an elegant harmony.” While the term usually refers to well crafted artifacts, there are also organizational concinnities – entities reflecting skillful blending of their parts achieving an elegant harmony. Companies that transcend the self-service perspective of Milton Friedman’s model of corporate purpose (to make profits – period!) are likely to be concinnities. Firms of endearment (FoEs) are such companies.

FoEs do not prioritize attention to various stakeholders. They reach out to all stakeholder groups, well beyond traditional limits. Above all, they transcend preoccupation with the interests of executive management and shareholders. This becomes crystal clear in the scale of FoE executive compensation packages. In general, they are more modest than compensation packages of non-FoE executives.

Maslow would view FoEs as having reached the organizational equivalent of self-actualization. To reach that level in human life requires “letting go” of the ego. With ego in recession, a person’s worldview changes from self-centeredness to others-centeredness. This doesn’t mean the sacrifice of one’s self-interest. Self-interest is all the better served at the highest levels of maturity. This is true of companies as well as human beings.

Companies are extensions of people, especially their executive leadership; thus they project human behavioral traits in their operations. Some companies are wantonly aggressive. Others are uncaring about any adverse effects their operations and products may have on individuals, society and the environment. Still others have borderline personality disorders even though they manage to muddle through their soulless existence to maintain some semblance of success. Call all the foregoing types of companies developmentally retarded.

Then there are companies that seem to have it all together. They carry themselves with an engaging élan. A will for continuous innovation secures their adaptability to new challenges. They conduct their operations with a surefootedness that is the envy of their competitors. Stakeholders look up to these companies and hold them in their gaze with great esteem. Call these companies developmentally mature. They have achieved organizational concinnity. They exist and operate in elegant harmony internally and with all their stakeholders.

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Would any reader like to nominate a company he or she believes represents “a skillful blending of the parts achieving an elegant harmony”?