What Marketers Need to Know About Aging Boomers (Part 5, cont'd)

It's Time Marketing Comes to Terms with Jung's Third Task of Aging

Reality is the enemy of youth. It’s a stop light on the highway of life. It’s rain that falls on a young person’s parade.

The teen aged driver careens around a curve at a perilous speed, totally disconnected from the reality of his mortality. The newly minted college graduate marches off into the real world, armed with dreams uncompromised by doubt. Ahead lies only the promise of a life sublimely golden.

The hucksters of Madison Avenue know these things about youth. They know that the young are suffused with a robust idealized image of the world and their place in it. So, in the days when youth ruled the marketplace, advertising creatives got accustomed to fashioning messages about limitless possibilities. In congruence with the dreams of the young, marketing message creators depicted perfect people with perfect friends and perfect significant others in their ads. And those people had perfect babies.

Sooner or later for most people – the practical ones, at least – a sense of reality begins eroding our idealized images of who we are, what we can expect from others, and what life holds in store for us. This most commonly happens in the middle years, maybe even starting a little earlier in the mid to later 30s.

That all being said, marketing messages routinely project idealized images that the more seasoned mind does not connect with. Perhaps because most people creating marketing messages have yet to reach the age when reality begins to moderate idealism, it is only to be expected that their values and worldviews will seep into their work done for aging boomers or older people.

Sure, there are those in their 50s, 60s and older who still dream with the fancifulness of untried youth, but the joys they seek will become more elusive by the year, for they have failed to work on Jung’s Third Task of Aging, coming to terms with reality.

Now it’s the marketing community’s time to come to terms with reality. As Unilever’s brand Dove has done. And sneaker maker New Balance has done. And as women’s apparel chain, Chico’s has done.

None of those brands and others I could cite thinks about being “aspirational,” a cliché term that is a kind of code word in marketing for people’s idealized ruminations about who they want to be and what they want to experience. It’s okay to aspire to something, but most people in midlife and beyond nurture their aspirations with feet more solidly placed on Mother Earth than the young typically do.

It’s time that marketers come to terms with reality as it is perceived by the 136 million people who are over the age of 40, when reality finally begins to settle into a person’s psyche in ways that bring great changes in what he or she expect out of life.

Next: Jung's Fourth Task of Aging: Letting Go of the Ego

 

Comments

[Aarlapati]

For me, it's Easter. But you can't have Easter without Christmas. Maybe we shulod be joyful and celebrate the Lord's birth and rising from the dead each and everyday. Really, why only showing thanksgiving 2 days a year.

[Lilo]

Kendall, I haven't done a very good job of documenting my ice cream mknaig over the summer. You can see a photo of one of my batches here I'll be sure to post more photos of the other flavors I make. For a good ice cream resource check out Ice Cream Club they have great posts on ice cream how-tos and on fun and original flavor combos.