Immersion Active presents Ageless Marketing

RE: Biz Week's "Love Those Boomers" Cover Story

I belong to a group that meets bi-annually, and has done so for 12 years. Some of the best minds in the country devoted to aging issues are members. We call ourselves The Society. Many members are authors and many are marketers like yours truly. Others fields represented include brain research, life insurance, citizen advocacy, travel, journalism, and broadcast media research. The Society is dedicated to changing how society thinks about aging and people in the second half of life.

Below is a fiery piece from fellow Societan, Jon Currie, who is a broadcast media researcher. Jon got ticked off by a Business Week’s cover story this week, “Love Those Boomers.” The article indicated that marketers are at long last finally adjusting to the fact that most of the money to spend is now under the control of the New Customer Majority – folks 40 and older who outnumber 18-39-year-olds by 132 million to 86 million. But Jon thinks Business Week doesn’t have it quite right yet.

We, in the Society, should really discuss this (the BIz Week story) at length. On the one hand these articles are big, bold and out there. On the other hand, I still can see ZERO change in the real world of media, advertising and marketing.

I inhabit this world and I can tell you--it is not changing. In fact, it is getting worse. I can prove it to anyone who cares to listen. For example,

The most successful new show this year is Commander in Chief on ABC. Number 1 new show! ABC just last week fired the creator--the creator--and head writer. Unheard of in a new show!

Why? Because this number one new show was SKEWING TOO OLD!!!! Yes, that's right folks. It actually did not hit the amazing target demo (as we call it) of 18-49s,18-34s, or those folks commonly known as my kids or the ones making me coffee at Starbucks. That key market.

And BTW, I am ready and willing and able to give full on talks and presentations on this disconnect to any group who will listen.

Yes, I am on fire about this. Have been and will be until it changes.

Jon E. Currie
Currie Communications, Inc.
desk: 310-454-3467
cell: 310-804-2522

I’d be interested in the reactions of readers of this blog to Jon’s polemic.

The DNA of Behavior, Part 7

A Sampler of P-Values Across the Lifespan

About 30,000 years ago there was a sudden explosion in human longevity. No one knows why, but paleoanthropologists are pretty certain that it played a major role in the simultaneous emergence of modern behaviors such as metalworking and changes in food preparation.

The radical (for the times) changes in longevity introduced another novelty into human life: grandparents. This may have been the most significant result. Before grandparents became common participants in family life, human society almost exclusively revolved around the chemistry of youth, the time of life when egocentrism is strongest.

The accompanying chart offers a sampling of the differences between people in the first and second half of life. Outlook and behavior in the first half of life is largely self-centered – even among those who ostensibly seem otherwise by virtue of having entered a caring profession. Such choices early in life usually have more to do with identity formation than with altruism.

In the second half of life, when people begin to ponder the meaning of life, of their life, outlook and behavior takes on more of an altruistic bent. Not everyone experiences this transcendence of purpose because people vary in the degree to which they achieve psychological maturity. However, moving into a disposition for generativity is on the natural path of development.

My view is that civilization began evolving once grandparents came into the picture because having experienced so much more that the young around them, they were able to moderate the intemperate behavior of aggressive youth. The fiery temperament common among the young worked well in mate selection because it ensured that the genes of the strongest continuously replenished the gene pool. However, it also made for short lives – and a general absence of grandparents.

And so it is that the first half of life is more about the self and the second half of life is more about the family, the group, the society, the species. So, be careful about depicting people in midlife and older in self-indulgent behaviors. You may be more heavily focused on egocentric values than they are.

Next: Necessity is the Mother of Learning

The DNA of Behavior, Part 6

The Animating Force of Life That Marketers  Generally Ignore

Purpose or P-Values drive behavior and motivations that give people a feeling that their life is worthwhile. A sense of purpose focuses our energies. It is a crucial animating force in life.

Lack of a sense of purpose is enervating and emotionally depressing. I find it intriguing that when a cell no longer has a job to do, no longer has a purpose, though perfectly healthy it commits suicide in a process called apoptosis.

Animals in the wild that no longer have purpose are similarly at risk. Psychologist John Calhoun found that when overpopulation reduced meaningful role opportunities below a certain threshold, cannibalism, raticide, premature menopause and ultimately the inability of females to develop into a reproductive stage destroyed the entire colony.

Purpose is a primal need that is essential to life. 

While I-Values (the individual self) and R-Values (the social self)) are heavily exploited in marketing, P-Values (the inner self) receive the least amount of attention of all primary core value systems despite their importance.

While working on a project for Del Webb in the early 1990s, I argued that ads dominated by R-Values (gold courses, endless play, etc.) failed to engage many potential customers. A life of fulltime play is bereft of purpose.

Many retirees, especially men who no longer have a career to give them a sense of purpose, suffer from a sense of purposelessness or resent the fact that society sees them as having no purpose beyond “living out the golden years in fun.” One man in a focus group said, “We live in a society where you are what you do. So when you retire, you do nothing, therefore you are nothing.”

Del Web agreed after several years of badgering to let Phoenix agency Second Chapter head Mike Baumayr develop a print ad that projected P-Values. The ad showed a woman standing in her greenhouse, arms on hips, head slightly cocked saying, “Your golf courses are beautiful. But I don’t play golf.” The ad yielded more prospects than any recent ad had. Why? It presented images of retirement as a time for purposeful living, not just play.

Few marketers give customers’ P-Values much thought. The one exception is marketers for nonprofit organizations. They connect with people’s P-Values altruistic side. The United Negro College Fund’s tagline, A mind is a terrible thing to waste is an example of an appeal to P-Values. The subtext is a call for people to do good by helping young students.

Tom’s of Maine is organized largely around P-Values. The following words from Tom’s website demonstrate how the company connects with people’s desires to have purpose beyond their immediate selves:

Tom's has always been a community of people grounded in respect for another, animals and nature. At Tom’s of Maine, Natural Care is a way of life that guides what we make and all that we do. We think of Natural Care as many things – caring for nature, for our customers, and for our communities. We do this by creating safe, effective natural products free of dyes, sweeteners, and preservatives; by harvesting, processing, and packaging with respect for our natural resources; and by donating 10% of our profits and 5% of our employees' paid time to charitable organizations.

From its founding by Tom and Kate Chappell in 1970, moral values – doing the right thing as a life purpose – has been the foundation Tom’s of Maine’s business model. The company, which posts double-digit growth in good times and bad, marks its products up 20 to 40 percent over competing brands, demonstrating that many customers put price aside for brands that resonate with their P-Values.

Next: A Sampler of P-Value Motivations  Across the Lifespan

The DNA of Behavior, Part 5

A Sampler of R-Value Motivations Across the Lifespan

Things have distinct and stable identities in Newtonian physics. A hydrogen atom, consisting of a single negatively charged electron attended by a positively-charge proton, like yesterday’s headlines, never changes.

Matters are different, however, in the wacky world of quantum physics where an electron can be in multiple places simultaneously and it is impossible to the electron’s velocity and location simultaneously. The properties of an electron in substance, time and space depend on its relationships with other subatomic particles and forces.

People are quantum-like, not Newtonian-like in their various aspects of existence. Their properties depend on their relationships with other beings and the cultural forces in their environments. The properties of their beingness are also influenced by their state of development – how far along the road of psychological maturity they’ve traveled.

The accompanying chart (click on it to make it bigger), which presents a sampling of relationship motivations (R-Values), depicts materialism as the dominant force in relational dynamics in the first half of life and experientialism as the dominant force in the second half of life. In Erich Fromm’s parlance, the first half of life is mostly about having, while the second half of life is mostly about being.

Another difference in relational dynamics between people in the first and second half of life is the worldview through which relationships are seen. By worldview is meant how a person cognitively and emotionally connects to the world, not what his or her beliefs are – for example, a teen cognitively and emotionally connects differently to the world than his or her parents do.

First half worldviews lean toward a social bias: relationships are viewed in terms, first in terms of near absolute dependency in childhood, then in terms of the benefits they can bring a person in his or her social and vocational aspirations. Second half worldviews lean toward an inner self bias, meaning toward greater autonomy. This changes relational dynamics in varying degrees from person to person, but the general direction points toward decreased focus on self and greater focus on others, particularly on the following generation. Erik Erikson called this bent generativity.

As with the previous sampler of Identity-related motivations, the chart accompanying this post can be used in brainstorming a new campaign. Regardless of what research conducted in preparation for that campaign seems to indicate, this sampler of R-Value motivations can be regarded as universal motivations notwithstanding occasional exceptions.

Next: The Animating Force of Life that Marketers Generally Ignore

 

The DNA of Behavior, Part 4

A Special Theory of Psychosocial Relativity

This is the 100th year anniversary of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity in which he gave the world the most famous scientific formula of all times, E=MC².  The title of this post honors that landmark event.

People need the companionship and reinforcement of others to experience a sense of well being. Relationship or R-Values are the source of that need. R-Values are also the source of our need to connect to belief systems – religious, political, moral and otherwise – to guide us, and help us make sense of what we experience.

Our relationships change throughout life to keep pace with our evolving needs. Young people seek relationships that serve their social goals, from finding intimate partners to gaining access to career opportunities and leveraging those opportunities. In this sense, they are more opportunistic in forging relationships than people in the second half of life generally are. The latter are likelier to be less concerned about what they get out of a relationship than about what they put it. They generally seek the safety, security, comfort and pleasure of stable relationships. For this reason, brand loyalty should be rising as the median age rises. But brand loyalty has fallen as the population has aged.

That indicates the extent to which companies are out of touch with customers’ needs and desires. A quarter of a century ago, the Madison Avenue idea that older consumers are more deeply committed to brands was valid. Now, according to a 2002 Roper ASW survey, second half customers are often quicker to switch brands than first half customers.

Customer loyalty has plummeted in large part because many companies don’t want relationships with their customers. In the interest of cutting costs, companies minimize customer contact through technology and other means. This compromises the human interface that companies need to build and maintain loyal customer relationships. I find it astonishing that for all the talk about the economic value of keeping customers for life, many companies do all they can to avoid having a human relationship with customers.

Sometimes we hear, “Customers don’t want loving relationships with companies; they just want good products, good value and courteous treatment.” I have news for people who say that. While people may not be looking for relationships that make them go all aflutter, absent feel-good experiences, there is nothing to bind a customer to any brand or company.

Many power brands have R-Value oriented taglines

Taglines for many brands play the relationship card. Some examples of R-Value centered taglines: FTD (“Say it with flowers”); State Farm (“Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there”); Hallmark (“When you care enough to send the very best”). ATT’s “Reach out and touch someone” was a strong R-Value oriented tagline that AT&T abandoned to promote technology and pricing over relationships.

AOL’s meteoric rise in the 1990s was fueled by Steve Case’s intuitive grasp of the value of projecting R-Values in marketing communications. Other Internet service providers in the fledgling days of the Internet, such as CompuServe and Prodigy, sought to grow by serving the then oft-spoken mantra, “Content is king.” That was a pure left brain view of the Internet and its potential. R-Values are essentially rooted in the relationship-minded right brain. Steve Case vanquished his competitors by taking a right brain path. AOL catalyzed the formation of thousands of online communities. Over 6,000 AOL subscribers volunteered to serve as chat room moderators. Steve Case built his company around R-Values.

Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos also based his company largely on an R-value shaped scenario. He invited customers to review books and products, and make their comments, thereby forming a collaboration with customers to build the brand. Many people – myself included – rarely buy a book or other product from Amazon without first seeing what other customers have to say.

Next: A Sampler of R-Value Motivations Across the Lifespan

The DNA of Behavior, Part 3

A Sampler of I-Value Motivations Across the Lifespan

Identity Values generate differing needs depending on where one is in the trajectory of personal growth. For example, the teenager need to forge a social face or persona sufficient to mark the separation of child from parent is a need that generally does not exist in adulthood.

In the middle years of life, people generally begin feel a need to gain a clearer sense of the meaning of their lives. Twenty-five year olds usually so not spend much time on this deep, existential question.

In the final quarter of life, people typically have a need to consider how they will be remembered. Resolving legacy issues is essential to aging successfully, that is, with a sense of satisfaction and completeness to one’s life.

The accompanying chart (click to enlarge) is a sampling of I-Value motivations in both the first and second halves of life. Notice at the top the words “Dependent” and “Autonomy”.  They refer respectively to the dependence of people in the first half of life upon others for cues and clues as to how best present one’s self, and in the second half of life the overarching need to achieve relative independence from rote subservience to the influence of others.

Importantly, understanding the sampling of motivations in the second half of life is facilitated by viewing them in terms of their contrast with motivations in the first half of life.

This sampling can be usefully referenced in planning either a single communications piece or an entire campaign. Doing so will put you into the bull’s eye of consumers’ deeper needs.

Next: A Special Theory of Psychosocial Relativity.

The DNA of Behavior, Part 2

From Here to Eternity: How Identity Needs Change Across the Lifespan

Identity Values, the source of motivations in pursuit of self-preservation and personal growth, are about the self, its image projection in time and space, its continuity, and for believers in an afterlife, its projection into eternity. Nothing else so strongly influences consumer behavior and lifestyles because nothing so broadly and deeply influences each human life.

The 17th Century philosopher Baruch Spinoza asserted this when he said, “Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being,” He called this conatus, the primary life force that motivates each thing to persist in its existence, not in a constant state, but in a state of continuous development. I-Values are the starter engine of life. I-Values have a dark side. They spark conflict between people, from the petty squabbles of lovers to raging wars between nations. People operating on the dark side of I-Values are obsessed with control. They try to recreate themselves in others by getting others to do as they would do, be as they would be, and believe as they believe.

When Maslow described self-actualizers as being detached from the world, he didn’t mean they had become socially withdrawn. He meant they had renounced the immature obsession with controlling others.

Sometimes I ask an audience to name the biggest problem between people in personal relationships. The consensus is invariably miscommunication. But when I suggest that attempts by one person to control another is a bigger problem, audience consensus invariably shifts in support of that proposition. I see heads bobbing in assent as the consensus shifts, which leaves me wondering how many people bobbing their heads have recently experienced someone close trying to control them.

I-Values motivate people to tattoo their bodies and pierce their body parts. Young people – mostly males – often put life and limb at risk doing insanely stupid things to assert their identities. People get divorced over identity issues. Women endure uncomfortable apparel to assert their identities. Religion-inspired wars are about identity.

I-Values are the primary motivating driver of human achievement. They encompass the libido – not Freud’s sex-drenched libido, but the more expansive Jungian libido that drives us to recreate ourselves in everything we do. From artists projecting their identities on canvas to teachers molding students, politician motivating crowds and lawyers persuading juries, we all strive each day to recreate ourselves in what we do.

What higher service can you as a marketer provide your customers than to help them recreate themselves through the brands you market? Take legacy – proof that our lives have been worthwhile after we are gone. Concern about legacy grows stronger as we move through the second half of our lives. We pursue temporal continuity through our legacy. That is why wealthy benefactors set up foundations, leave money to worthy causes, and buy naming rights to buildings on college campuses.

The the Patek Phillippe ad I posted over a year ago is a brilliant invocation of the I-Value generated need for a sense of immortality in marketing a watch. (Click on the ad to enlarge it.) The legacy theme has been so successful that Patek Phillippe is still employing it 10 years after the first legacy ad was run. It stands in sharp contrast to the egocentric foundations of Rolex ads.

Next: A Sampling of I-Value Motivations Across the Lifespan

The DNA of Behavior

 

Basic Life Value: The Foundation of All Behavior

(First in a series that explores the foundations of behavior.)

Several weeks ago reader Arnold Howard suggested I explore differences on “how generations are different and how they are the same. Thus I’m opening a new thread to do just that. For those who want more, my book Ageless Marketing goes in to greater detail on many of the points I will be discussing in this thread.

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Dangling a dead insect before a frog elicits no response in its brain because dead insects are not on a frog’s survival scenario menu of things to eat. Only lively insects get a frog’s attention. Electrodes spiked into its brain indicates that its brain detects the insect, but the message does not reach the part of the frog’s brain that controls its ever-eager tongue because dead insects have no personal relevance to a frog’s survival scenario.

Survival scenarios are the sum total of everything needed for a safe, comfortable and pleasurable existence. What makes for a safe, comfortable and pleasurable existence for a frog is quite different from what humans require in the same regard.

Famed brain researcher Antonio Damasio reminds us in Descartes’ Error that willful action depends first on attentionality, then on working memory. An ad has to grab a person’s attention before she can think about it. Then the ad must contain enough relevance to her survival scenario that she can keep track of information in the ad as she takes it in, manipulates it and massages the information into final perceptions, concrete thoughts and a final decision. But what coheres the customer’s attentionality and what engages her working memory? Damasio proposes that some “basic life value” – some innate force or forces catalyzes attentionality and turns on working memory.

Nothing coheres attentionality and engages working memory more forcefully than an event that threatens a person’s existence. Thus, the most basic life value is the will to live, and the most basic behavior consists of acts in service of self-preservation.

But there is much more to self-preservation than dealing with threats to continuation of life. Quality of life is necessary to make it worth continuing. Life quality depends on a secure sense of identity, connectedness to others, feelings of purpose, skills and knowledge adequate to accomplishing one’s objectives, and finally physical and psychological health and well being.

To create marketing messages that survive information triage – the process by which the brain selects what enters its owner’s conscious mind – with enough force to cohere attentionality and engage working memory, messages must have some connection with basic life values. These values are not determined by the conscious, willful mind. They are encoded in the chemistry of DNA. We can safely presume that basic life values, which I refer to as primary core values, are embedded in our biology because they are present in every person in every generation.

The five primary core values that qualify as the “basic life value,” which Damasio says underlies all behavior are in brief:

· Identity Values – source of motivations in pursuit of self-preservation and personal growth.

· Relationship Values – source of motivations in pursuit of connections to people and other beings and to institutions and beliefs

· Purpose Values – source of motivations in pursuit of a life that has meaning

· Adaptation Values – source of motivations in pursuit of skills and knowledge to negotiate life

· Energy Values – source of motivations in pursuit of health, well being and functionality

All needs and all the motivations urging their satisfaction ultimately track back to those five primary core values. They constitute, as it were, the DNA of behavior – the basic building blocks from which all behavior springs.

Next, From Here to Eternity: How Identity Needs Change Across the Life Span

Marketing to Women

Check out this article from Ad Age about the currnent Dove campaign written by my good friend Marti Barletta. Marti wrote Marketing to Women. If you haven't read it yet, it's time you did because as Marti  reminds us about 80% of all consumer spending is controlled by women. And women don't think like, act like and buy like men do. Would you beleive that women spend more money on computers than men? Sounds crazy? Not when you realize that there are more women in corporate purchasing than men. Perhaps even more surprising, according to Marti, women account for most rider lawnmower sales. Hmmm. I guess that's because the women of the house mows the grass while the man of the house is inside on his bum watching sports.

What I Have Been Doing This Week

Greetings from St. Gallen, Switzerland, a charming Alpine town founded by the Irish monk Gallus in 612. It is located near the German and Austrian borders. I came here to give a talk on ageless marketing to the Viva 50 Plus World Ageing and Generations Congress.

Attended by delegates from over 40 nations around the world, the quality of sessions and speakers was superior – perhaps, the highest quality of any conference I’ve ever attended.

This was the first international congress under the Viva 50 Plus name. The Second Annual Congress will be held September 27-30, 2006.

Viva 50 Plus is an interdisciplinary platform for examining global, national and regional implications of aging societies around the world. Delegates and speakers to the first Congress included economists, demographers, epidemiologists, industrial designers, manufacturers, geriatricians, psychologists, political and public administration leaders – and of course, marketers.

Frankly, I rarely spend much time attending sessions at conferences because they either lack relevance to my interests or offer little new information. But at Viva 50 Plus my problem was resolving conflicts between my desires to be in two or more sessions in the same time slot. Even so, every session I ended up attending was first rate.

I was late getting to one session I desperately wanted to attend, fearing I would find standing room only. To my surprise, is was the most scantily attended session of all I attended. I was shocked because it was about one of the most important issues of aging that cuts across all disciplines. The topic was “Successful Cognitive Aging.”

As a marketer, I’m keenly interested in how aging correlates with changes in cognitive processes. Significant differences exist across the life span in how people process information. Of no less importance, are cohort differences among members of the same cohort, differences that become more pronounced in the second half of life.

Why wouldn’t anyone with something to sell in second half of life markets (40+) want to learn how age influences the ways in which consumers respond to marketing and sales approaches?

One intriguing new piece of knowledge I took away from this session is that human beings appear to be getting smarter according to a longitudinal study now spanning nearly 25 years. The study has found that the reasoning abilities (as well as other cognitive abilities) of today’s 40-year olds are generally superior to those of the 40-year-olds in the early years of the study.

That people’s cognitive skills have improved in the post-Industrial Age and will continue to do so holds crucial importance in marketing. It has implications for the syntax of messages, as well as for graphics, amount of information conveyed, and pace of message delivery among other dimensions of marketing communications.

But there I was – the only person in the room who is involved in marketing to older people – drinking in enormously important information like a thirsty desert traveler. (The others were academicians.) I felt badly for the presenters. But I am in an even stronger position to serve my clients for having taken in what they freely offered.

While at the Congress I ran into a brilliant industrial designer, Dan Formosa, winner of countless international awards for numerous well-known products and product cases. Dan lamented the state of consumer research for the dearth of understanding of human behavior among researchers. I can only agree with Dan without reservation.

When I get back to my office I plan to take my readers on a journey through one of the issues Dan and I discussed: consumers’ needs and their motivations to satisfy them.