Immersion Active presents Ageless Marketing

More on Ameriprise's Misreading of Boomers

Click here   to see what others have to say about the Ameriprise TV commercials directed to boomers that I talked about in the previous post. Especially note Chuck Nyren’s comments and click on the links to postings he has made on the topic. Then follow the links he provides to other blogs to see what still others have to say about Ameriprise’s pandering to boomers.

It seems that I’ve joined the battle against these commercials long after Chuck and others weighed in on the embarrassingly clumsy commercials Ameriprise hoped would have zillions of boomers hitting the phones to get that Ameriprise financial planner who would understand them because they’ve earnedall  about the pot-inhaling, free loving, poke-a-flower-in-a-reservist’s-rifle generation.

How does a company as august as American Express, which owns the Ameriprise brand, get snookered into buying into such claptrap? The answer is that it all starts with flawed research (see yesterday’s post), the results of which are almost certainly memorialized by whip smart under-40 creatives (or immature over-40 creatives) who have total certainty about their ability to speak boomerese.

Borrowing from another triadic expression, there are three things to remember when marketing to boomers – and in fact to the full over-40 population: authenticity, authenticity and authenticity.

Remember the sage Polonius saying to his son Laertes in Hamlet: “This above all else, to thine ownself be true. For as surely as night follows day, thou canst not be false to any man."

Ameriprise has not been true to itself in these grossly unauthentic commercials. They stand as a supreme monument of how not to approach those in the marketplace who have entered the second half of life. As Carl Jung long ago showed us, artifice is the tool of youth to gain recognition and opportunity. He called its face the persona – Latin for mask . The maturing mind dissolves the persona in the second half of life to reveal the true self. This gives rise to a lower threshhold of intolerance for such manipulative approaches as evident in Ameriprise’s pitch to the aging boomer soul.

Click here to see the commercials. 

Ameriprise Doesn't Get It

Ever since January 1 of this year, the day the oldest boomers celebrated their 60^th birthday, interest in the most numerous and wealthiest adult segment – people age 50 and older – has been rising by the day. Aging boomers are the central focus of this event.

As one who has spent many years studying the annals of older adult development, I feel qualified to make judgments on how well the pitchmen of advertising are connecting with aging boomers. Either legions of researchers in adult development psychology have created a large body of bogus findings or nearly all of those who craft messages for older minds are hopelessly out of sync with the realities of maturation.

Take for example, the pandering television commercials that Ameriprise is currently running. The commercials’ creators think that by connecting boomers past with their present makes Ameriprise the superior source for finding a financial advisor with whom boomers can build a meaningful relationship because, “You are the generation that gave a new meaning to the meaningful relationship, and we can relate to that.”

With that demonstration of inanity you can surely understand why I call these commercials pandering. They try to connect with where boomers were, not where they are. Sure, nostalgic reverie brings pleasure to us, but it is hardly a platform on which to build present day aspirations and develop plans for their fulfillment.

People in their 50s and 60s are more focused on where they are headed than on where they have been. For more than a few boomers, much of who they were and much of what they did in their adolescent and earliest adult years is more embarassing than something to look back on. Ameriprise is not likely to connect very deeply with very many boomers by making those years such a big issue as they do in these commercials.

These commercials reflect a superficial reading of personalities made more complex by time, experience and the ancient processes of human development. They no doubt sprung from survey research and were tested in focus groups. However, posing hypotheticals to subjects in consumer research tends to create a murk if not altogether error-studded picture of behavioral realities.

The reason that is so is because we use differnt brain sites and processes in reacting to hypothetical propositions than when we are operating in a real life, real time scenario.That's one of the biggest reasons why the failure rate of new products runs in the neighborhood of 90 percent.

Take a look at the Ameriprise commercial by clicking here. I would like very much to get some feedback from readers.

The Marketing Power of Stories

We hear more and more these days that telling a story can be more effective in engaging consumers than a declarative statement that makes claims about a product or service.

So let me tell you a story in evidence of that.

A few years back a major financial services company retained a colleague and me to develop six new seminars for use in prospecting for new clients in the 50-plus category. The client had been using seminars designed by a publishing firm that primarily served the financial services industry.

We were told that the seminars should run no more than 25 to 30 minutes before Q & A time. “After that older people’s eyes begin to glaze over,” we were told. But we ignored this caveat. I knew that “older people” sit still in movies running two or more hours - some sit through Wagner’s epic Ring opera, Götterdämmerung for a tush-trying five hours. In fact, older folks make up a goodly portion of a typical Götterdämmerung performance at the Met.

We knew that people's eyes glaza over when they are bored. A seminar revolving around line graphs showing how stocks outperform treasuries, pie charts of growth oriented portfolios, and bar charts showing whatever will most certainly cause eyes to glaze in short order. But the same information can be gotten across in adrenalin stimulating real life stories.

The problem was not information content, but in how the information  was conveyed. So I ignored the client's caveatre about seminar length.

I first drew up personality sketches for more than 20 people who would be players in the stories I planned to write. It was a cast of characters worthy of a Russian novel.

John and Mary Everett were the main characters, with financial advisor Sandy Edmond. The Everetts were both 69, had been married nearly 50 years and were fully retired.

Seminar themes to be developed in story form included estate planning, charitable giving, healthcare planning and investment strategies.

The stories we crafted were as complex and multifaceted as a soap opera. There was Gloria Swartz whose husband Arney suddenly dropped dead of a heart attack leaving her with prospects of an annual $20,000 cash shortage at her current living standard, and a portfolio of highly speculative mostly poor performing stocks. Another story involved a couple facing estate planning challenges that arose due to children from previous marriages including one middle aged mentally retarded adult child.

When we presented the first seminar to the client’s representative, she was shocked.” This seminar is much longer than it should be. It must be at least an hour long!”

“Actually,” I told her, "it works out to be closer to an hour and a half.”

She would shortly learn whether it was too long. We had two audiences scheduled to test the story telling approach. The results were positive. We were authorized to continue developing these seminars that were "too long", using story telling to get our points across.

One financial advisor in saying much he loved this approach told of how he had elaborated the stories, making them about two hours long. Then he said, “You know those cards we pass around after a seminar asking people to rate the seminar? You’d be surprised to see how many said the seminar is too short. Should be longer.”

Telling stories allowed us to convey more information than the more typical declarative approach to seminar delivery. Telling stories also increased the percentage of audiences that signed up for first appointments.

The company was so pleased with the results of this new style of prospecting seminars that it decided to set up an in-house capability to develop future seminars, using story telling techniques in all market segments. It was probably cheaper to design the seminars in house. But as effective? I wonder to this day.

 

The Decline of the Efficacy of Consumer Segmentation

Yes – I’m still among the quick. I’ve just been so slammed that I’ve had no time to do any postings. My most recent distraction from this blog was the Fifth Annual Beyond the Numbers Summit in Miami. If you didn’t make this year’s meeting, pencil in the first week in April 2007 on your calendar for BTN VI. BTN gets better by the year.

Produced by PME Enterprises for JWT, the humongous WPP agency formerly known as J. Walter Thompson, BTN attempts to get beyond the reduction of older consumers to numbers to get into the deeper recesses of their psyches. Nevertheless, even at BTN there is the occasional presenter who still seems restricted by a numbers-based view of consumers and their lives.

Still, many attendees leave BTN having experienced a tectonic shift in their perceptions of consumers in the second half of life. For the first time they realize that a 60-year-old is not simply a 30-year-older version of her 30-year-old self. They learn at least one big reason why advertising directed at older people often falls flat – despite older faces in ads and brochures, body copy reflects the values of the young people creating them.

An even bigger and more critical lesson BTN first-time attendees walk away with is a realization that people in the 40-plus bracket cannot be so neatly segmented as younger people. This is like a kayaker losing his paddle in the middle of a white water descent through a rock-studded falls. “If segmentation doesn’t work all that well, how do you single out prospects for your product?”

The answer lies in mastering the universal dimensions of human beingness. For example, all humans want love. But they want it in different ways by season of life. All human beings also want a sense of purpose, but once again in forms that vary by season of life.

New Balance understands the role of behavioral universals as well as any company does. It’s positioning at the macro level is based on the idea oaf a balanced life in which one continuously grows as a person. This is in contrast to Nike’s focus on winning and aggressive self-expression.

However, New Balance does not ignore segmentation. Rather, it consigns its practice mainly to its channel management activities. Shoe styles and marketing collaterals in a Footlocker are quite different from those found in a Nordstrom’s.

The idea is not that segmentation is a bad idea, but that it is overused to the point that companies cut themselves out of consumer populations who don’t fall within a targeted segment. The fear that marketing to older people will turn younger people away from a brand is based on mindless embrace of market segmentation. But New Balance has seen its market share among youth increase over the past decade while the market shares held by Nike, Adidas and Rebook has fallen. Neither of those three has managed to construct a marketing position that consistently resonates across wide generational divides. They fear that messages that have a strong appeal among older people will be turn-offs to younger people.

Attendees of the BTN Summits get these kinds of valuable insights. I was particularly cheered this year by the conference-closing message of Lori Bitter, JWT partner and co-director of its Mature Market Group. Lori warned the audience to not become a mindless slave of labels, such as “Boomers.” While admitting to their value as shorthand, they encourage us to forego critical thinking, she charged.

With so much interest in boomers these days, and a population explosion among boomer “experts,” Lori’s words should be taken deeply to heart. In my own travels around the country I have found very few of these experts who have any more than a common street level understanding of the midlife behavior of people in midlife and beyond. From podiums, in books, and in countless articles I hear statements made about aging boomers that simply are not supported in the annals of adult development psychology.

So, as Lori Bitter says, “Beware of labels – they can lead you down the wrong path.”

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Reader Georgi Mammen Mullassery asked me to direct readers to an entry in his blog on the structural and behavioral differences in the brains of males and females: His request was inspired by my March 10, 2006 posting, “Gender Specific Changes in Mid- and Later Life Worldviews”