Immersion Active presents Ageless Marketing

The Legacy I Hope to Leave the Marketing Profession

On occasion I am asked about the legacy I would like most to leave to the profession I have devoted the past 25 years of my life to. The answer is:

Acceptance of adult development as the foundation of marketing theory, study and practice.

Though I have no degree in psychology, I have been fascinated by the field ever since as a practicing landscape architect I wanted to know more about how people used and took pleasure in (or ignored) the gardens, playgrounds and community land plans I designed. So I began reading in psychology.

Over the years I gravitated toward developmental psychology, a move that was accelerated by my becoming a single father of two daughters. The youngest, Stephanie, was three when I became her sole custodian. I wanted to know about her stages of development before she entered them so that I would be better prepared for what was to come. So I began by reading about the ideas of Swiss behavioral theorist Jean Piaget on childhood development.

While learning more about childhood development, my career path was shifting toward an exclusive focus on so-called senior markets. Curious about differences in marketplace behavior between people of differing ages, I extended my studies of human development from childhood, through early adulthood and into old age. However, most of my reading about adult development focused on the second half of life – from around the age of 40 onward. I chose 40 as the demarcation  between "younger" and "older" consumers rather than age 50 because age onset behavioral differences seen more clearly at age 50 actually have their roots in significant personality changes that typically emerge around 40 give or take a year or two.

As I delved deeper into the topic of adult development via Carl Jung, Erik Erikson, Abraham Maslow, David Gutmann and others, it became vividly apparent that the marketing professions, including consumer research, were ill-prepared for the then still-to-come onslaught of “second half” customers, more specifically, aging boomers.The oldest boomer was 42 when in 1988 I set about writing The Ageless Market. I identified in this book a number of reasons why marketers were grossly unpreparedness for a marketplace dominated by second half customers. Sadly, many of those conditions continue to exist nearly 20 years later.

I plan to devote the next several posts showing how marketers can become markedly more effective by  integrating tenets of adult development psychology into the foundations of their consumer research and marketing practices.

On Aging and Humor: Comedians vs. Acadamicians on the Topic

Beware of Specious Correlations

If you still have grandparents or even parents in your life, you’ve probably noticed from time-to-time a difference from you in what they find funny or not funny.

Not surprising, according to a new study by graduate student Wingyun Mak and psychology professor Brian Carpenter of St. Louis’s Washington University. The study reports that people have a harder time getting jokes as they age.

Depressing, isn’t it? I mean the very idea of life becoming less funny as we descend ever deeper into a dreary old age is a pretty sorry state to contemplate.

Well, thankfully, according to all evidence I have, the sources of those dour images of a humorless old age are wrong.

The researchers said, “Because older adults may have greater difficulty with cognitive flexibility, abstract reasoning and short-term memory, they also have greater difficulty with tests of humor comprehension.”

Sounds like a specious correlation, I’d say. My co-author of Ageless Marketing, Robert Snyder,  is famous in our circles for dismissing flawed reasoning based on specious correlations. Something like the guying standing on a street corner snapping his fingers for hours until a passerby asks him what he’s doing.

“Keeping tigers away,” answered the finger snapper.

“There are no tigers around here.”

“Aren’t you glad I’m keeping them away?”

Yes, cognitive operations do change with age (though not necessarily in an altogether negative sense). However, this does not automatically correlate with declining HQ – humor quotient.

According to many studies, including some referenced in Humor and Aging, edited by Lucille Nahemow et al, responsiveness to humor has a strong developmental component. In other words, you don’t always laugh at the same things at 50 that you did at 25.

A study in which comedians were surveyed about age and humor bears that out. Young audiences overwhelmingly prefer nonsense humor (a sitcom, anyone?”) The young also like aggressive humor. However, the study found that “The use of aggressive humor decreases abruptly when the audience becomes old.”

Old people tend to not like jokes that demean or otherwise put down a character in a story. Put down jokes are young people’s favorite style of humor (another sitcom, anyone?), while they were the least attractive style of joke to older people.

The performers (and who should know better about people’s joke preferences?) indicated that they expect puns and stories to be most appreciated by older people, next by the middle-aged, and least by the young.”

Nahemow writes, “The structure of humor is incongruity – the discrepancy between the expected and that which transpires accounts for the humorous experience.” Young people, simply by virtue of their lack of experience, are subject to more disconnect between expectations and how a joke ends.

Another way of stating that is that life experience can changes what is funny. It seems to me that the honorable researchers into humor and aging who hail from Washington University needed to do a great deal more background study on their subject before designing their research.

For my money, the comedians in the aforementioned study about age and humor are more credible sources of insight into old folk’s sense of humor: comedians who don’t make an audience laugh don’t get invited back.

_____________

Thanks to Tom Mann,Senior Vice President of Advertising, Erickson Communities, and Publisher of The Erickson Tribune for bringing the Washington University study on humor and aging to my attention.

 

What Marketers Need to Know About Aging Boomers , Part 9

Rebirth—Dying with Life

Jung’s last task of aging, “Rebirth — dying with life," is a familiar theme throughout the religious genre, but he was not thinking religion when he framed that task.Success in prosecuting this task leads to loss fear of life and death alike. Rebirth after dying with life transports a person into the timeless domains of an artist lost in his or her work or a child absorbed in play when living in the time of a delicious moment is all that matters.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced chick-sent-me-high-ee) is a professor and former chairman of the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago. Besides being a famous guy with an almost unpronounceable name, he has devoted his life's work to the study of what makes people truly happy, satisfied and fulfilled.

Csikszentmihalyi is famous for his ideas about mental flow in creativity. He says people enter a flow state when they are fully absorbed in activity during which they lose their sense of time and have feelings of great satisfaction.

Csikszentmihalyi describes flow as "being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost." (Italics added.)

That description of the transcendental effects of flow resounds with Maslow’s description of the mental state of people who reach the lofty realms of self-actualization. He described them as having reached a child-like state of total absorption in the moment. Maslow said, “Self-actualization means experiencing fully, vividly, selflessly, with full concentration and total absorption.” The self-actualizer passes through the time barrier where on the other side, “a day is a minute and a minute is a day.”

Shakespeare poignantly captures the timelessness that comes with rebirth in King Lear’s soliloquy to his daughter Cordelia in the time of their dying as though it were the time of their living for the first time:

…Come, Let’s away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds i’the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too,
Who loses and who wins; who’s in , who’s out;
And take upon’s the mystery of things,
As if we were God’s spies: and we’ll wear out,
In a walled prison, packs and sects of great ones,
That ebb and flow by th’moon.

—The Tragedy of King Lear, Act V/Scene 3

So what do these immortal words of Shakespeare, Maslow’s ideas about self-actualization and the Jungian seventh task of aging have to do with marketing?

One important take-away is that once our fear of life and death subside to do no more than an occasionally being a nuisance factor, the intellectual fraud that is the common fodder of marketing becomes boundlessly less tolerable.

Reflect for a moment on the central thrust of marketing: appeal to the ego through invocation of narcissistic and materialistic values. While developmentally immature personalities will always be part of mature society, aging boomers in general will reflect growing submersion of the egocentric self that has long been the principal target of consumer marketing.

And so it is that as the average age in the consumer universe continues rising, consumer resistance to traditional marketing will only increase unless a wave of professional rebirths takes place in the world of marketing.