Immersion Active presents Ageless Marketing

On Sloppy Scholarship and the Silent Generation

Sloppy scholarship sometimes makes me mad. I especially get upset when it shows up in a widely esteemed newspaper like the New York Times. Why? Because many people in important positions will take on faith claims made in the great gray lady of U.S. journalism irrespective of their accuracy or lack thereof.

Last Sunday’s editorial section carried such piece. It was titled, “When the Time Make the Man."

In it, editorial page editor Sam Tanenhaus poses the possibility that “Americans born in the 1930s lack the particular qualities we look for in our national leaders.”

I guess that pretty much takes care of presidential candidate John McCain's hopes. He was born in 1936.

McCain is a member of the Silent Generation – so called because it has failed to distinguish itself in the political life of America.

Full disclosure: I was born in 1933.

The problem with the Silents, says Tanenhaus, is that they were collectively disengaged from politics and distrustful of ideology. Just look at Edward Kennedy and Michael Dukakis Tanenhaus offers up as Exhibit A in making his claim about the congenitally weak leadership that marks those born in the 1930s.

If the reputation of the boomer generation has been hyperinflated, then the reputation of the Silent Generation has been as flat as yesterday’s beer. Tanenhaus completely disregards such nationally prominent – indeed, globally prominent in many cases – leaders as Martin Luther King (a fellow Silent, though born in 1929), Ralph Nader (1934), Tom Hayden (1939), Jerry Rubin (1938), Jane Fonda (1937), Abby Hoffman (1936), and Gloria Steinem (1934). In fact, nearly all the national leaders in the feminist movement of the 1960s and ‘70s were born in the 1930s.

You might not have liked the politics of those figures were you around and involved in the 1960s and ‘70s, but you can’t deny their status as national leaders. Collectively, they reshaped the politics and morals of the nation.

From the other end of the spectrum come such national leaders as James Baker (1930), Colin Powell (1937), and Donald Rumsfeld (1932).

A Wikipedia entry on has this to say about the Silent Generation:

In the book Boom Bust and Echo, Canadian author David Foot takes a different perspective on this group arguing that those born in the 1930s and early 1940s are the most successful generation. He argues that because so few people were born during the depression and the war that employment opportunities were abundant and this group quickly rose to the top and became the management and superiors of the great mass of baby boomers that came after them. Using economic indicators he finds that 1938 was the best year to be born in North America, in terms of economic success. The impact of the generation was also great culturally, as the musicians and thinkers such as Paul McCartney, John Lennon and Bob Dylan who shaped the fashions of the boomers and were often associated with the pop culture of the 1960s and 1970s.

In sum, Sam Tanenhaus’s take on the Silent Generation is unpardonable balderdash. But unfortunately, it reflects the sort of sloppy scholarship seen in the gross generalizations we suffer about boomers, and subsequent generations. Interestingly, no broadly accepted definition of how many years add up to a generation exists. Some references to Generation X mark its bookends as 1965 to 1976 – just 11 years.

Lack of consistency in how many years mark a generation doesn’t seem to bother those who insist on comparing generations in terms of buying power, worldviews and behavior.

The key take-away point of this post is beware of generational generalities. They have about as much utility in analyzing, planning and making marketing decisions as a fork has for eating soup.

For another critique of Sam Tanenhaus’s article see the Boston Globe’s Brainiac entry.

 

 

The Most Mythologized Generation in History

Surely the boomer generation, if not the greatest generation, is the most mythologized generation in history.

Interestingly the boomer generation was not named until former People magazine editor Landon Jones did so in his 1981book Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation. By then, the oldest boomer was 35-years-old – well past his or her hell-raising years of youthhood.

The term “boomer” has been a buzzword bigtime in marketing circles since the first boomers turned 60 in January of 2006. It seems that almost everyone in business is trying to figure out how to make oodles of money in boomer markets as its constituents head into their sunset years.

I am frequently asked, “What products do you think will do well in aging boomer markets.” My stock answer is, “same products that did well when their parents were in their twilight years.”

From podiums, in newsletters, in conference rooms and in books and media quotes, many self-avowed boomer experts spew out spurious claims that readers and audiences internalize as gospel fact. It starts with the claim that boomers have changed everything in their path from their childhood on.

For the record, boomers were not – despite oft-heard claims to the contrary – the driving force in the cultural upheavals of the 1960s and ‘70s. It was the so-called “Silent Generation” whose members included Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Nader, Bobby Kennedy, Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin, Stokely Carmichael, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez – and on and on and on. You will not find the name of a single boomer on any list of thought leaders in the 1960s and ‘70s.

Despite their overblown record as supreme world changers (keep in mind that every generation since the dawn of the industrial revolution has been a world-changing generation), boomers are still being described in unsupportable terms.

Take for example the claim that boomers are entering old age much healthier than their parents and destined to live much longer. In light of recent research, both claims turn out to be overstated.

Last Fall, Beth Soldo of the University of Pennsylvania released a study indicating that boomers are not as healthy as their parents were at comparable ages.

From all over came cries of denial and outrage by protagonists of boomer superiority. The data were incorrectly analyzed. The research protocols were flawed. The interpretations of findings failed to take into account the fact that boomers reporting poorer health than their parents simply have higher expectations about their health than parents. Those and other statements of protest sought to undermine Dr. Soldo’s research.

Now comes another study that supports Dr. Soldo’s research. According to a study covering 1,000 counties, life expectancy is falling for a significant number of women for the first time since the 1918 Spanish influenza epidemic. Life expectancy of men also fell, although by not so nearly large margins.

While the study was limited to a sampling of counties, a number of which are in poorer region of the country, the findings nevertheless indicate that claims of boomer superhealth are wildly overstated.

The fact that life expectancy is falling in a significant slice of the population should not be surprising given that 65 percent of Americans are overweight with nearly 35 percent being chronically obese. Those who talk about the trillion dollar-plus healthier and lnger living boomer population seem to be drawing on generalizations based on regulars at Gold’s Gym and the aging cyclists and runners on the trails and roadways in their communities.

So, the concluding point keep your grains of salt at hand when someone is about to tell you about boomers. Being the most mythologized generation in history, much of what you hear about boomers is sheer confabulation.

 

 

 

 

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10 Ideas That Are Changing the World We Live, Work and Play In (Part 3a)

World-changing idea #3: The Ebbing Value of Expertise (Part 2a)

Objectivity is supposedly the superior cognitive stance to take in searching for truth. But is that always the case? How often do we hear experts battling it out in courtrooms over two contradictory propositions based on alleged objective analysis?

The ubiquity of communications in our lives – including news and talk shows 24/7 – contributes to shaping an uncertain picture of what’s true and what’s not true in the mind of the market. The collective mind lacks the certainty it once had. People are depending less on the mills of reason, which produce certainty, than on the chemistry of their feelings – which produce only probabilities – in shaping shape their views. Stated another way, people are being less objective and more subjective in shaping their thoughts and decisions.

The aging of society is one of the biggest reasons for today’s more subjectively based zeitgeist. People’s confidence in their feelings tends to increase in the second half of life. More and more, “objective” facts appear to be someone’s opinion. This especially seems true to those who recall how often they’ve seen a study revealing some new truth that is later overturned by another study.

After four or five decades of life, human fallibility becomes all the more self-evident to many of us. The good news is that this inclines many of us to be forgiving of human error. However, it also makes us more guarded – less trusting of claims by others irrespective of any objective research behind the claims.

When we’re young, we often insist on objective proof that some claim is valid. This is why atheism generally arises earlier in life. By mid-adulthood, most of us become more comfortable with intuited conclusions whether or not they can be supported by objective reasoning.

Throughout the last half of the 20^th century, marketing was finely tuned to the objectively biased younger mind. Product ads cited allegedly scientific reasons why the advertised product was better than its competitors. Such advertising is out of tune with the subjectively biased zeitgeist of today. Marketing must court the emotional, intuitive, feeling side of the brain – the right brain.

The right brain is the pattern-seeking side of the brain. It looks for connections and relationships. Unlike the 20^th century market who pitched to the logical, reasoning, objective left side of the brain, 21^st century marketers will find greater success courting the right brain.

The right brain is the portal to the left brain: if something doesn’t feel right to the right brain, it’s not likely to earn landing rights in the left brain – especially among today’s adult majority.

The Internet has increased the confidence of people in their subjectively-derived view of the world. Everyone can be an expert in what ever field he or she chooses to be an expert. Whether that is true or not is unimportant. The fact that people believe they can become expert in a matter through the Internet is what is important.

Most of us probably have at least one story we can tell about how someone we know learned something on the Internet that they had been unable to find out about elsewhere. In some cases, that Internet acquired information has saved a life.

We have a story in our family about how the Internet was the ultimate source of a new life. For nearly 20 years one of my daughters had a condition that no doctor she went to could name. Two of its symptoms were morbid obesity and infertility. About 10 years ago, my daughter learned the name of her malady on the Internet and how she could get relief from its symptoms. In just 11 months she shed 110 pounds, and with her return to normal weight she became fertile. Within a year she had her first natural born child – a daughter named Elizabeth. She had already adopted three children.

Due to that and several other experiences – one that was life threatening to one of her adopted daughters – my daughter is not easily impressed with someone's alleged expertise. She, like many people in today’s marketplace, want to explore the relationship potential before getting around to the left brain chore of assessing the matter of expertise.

So, the challenge to marketers in this day when the value customers accord alleged expertise is waning is to learn better how to develop the relationship between providers and customers. That’s not easy to for practitioners in a field noted for crowing about being the best, the greatest value, the most dependable in its line, the most beautiful of all, etc. Today’s zeitgeist calls for building human relationships with customers – not commercial or transactional relationships.

 

 

10 Ideas That Are Changing the World We Live, Work and Play In (Part 3)

World-changing idea #3: The Ebbing Value of Expertise

“I’m being objective!” Surely, you’ve had someone you’ve been arguing with scream that at you. Perhaps you have even yelled those words yourself on occasion.

I remember – always with a smile on my face a self-styled “left brain” account shouting at me in disagreement on a point, “God damn it! I’m being objective. You are being emotional,” as he pounded a clenched fist on the conference room table.

Objectivity ain’t what it used to be. In fact, its popularity is dwindling. Farhad Manjoo titles the penultimate chapter in his True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society “The Twilight of Objectivity.”

Tradition holds that truth is accessible only through objective inquiry and accurately transmittable only through dispassionately executed argument. However, a proposition that is broadly held to reflect objective reality, even if held so for centuries, ultimately has no defensible eternal claim of veracity. It is but a consensus about a purported slice of reality.

A steady decline of confidence in objective thought is lowering the value  people place in the idea of expertise because we tend to associate expertise not only with experience, but with the ability to think objectively about matters, leaving emotions or subjective perceptions on the sidelines. We want this ability in our judges, personal lawyers, doctors, financial analysts and other we've elected or hired to protect and serve our interests.

Social philosopher Pierre Levy observed in Collective Intelligence (1994):

“Only by incorporating cultural and moral objectives, aesthetic experience, can business engage the subjectivity of its employees, as well its customers…

… Because it conditions all other activities, the continuous production of subjectivity will most likely be considered the major economic activity throughout (this) century.”

Levy is talking about what Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore call the Experience Economy in their book by that name. He is talking about Dan Pink’s A Whole New Mind . Pink, like True Enough’s Manjoo, is a celebrant in the last rites for objectivity – or more properly perhaps, Cartesian objectivity.

For several centuries, science has unfolded in accordance with Rene Descartes’ tenet that nothing can be deemed true until proven to be so through objective analysis that yields predictable hence replicable results. Over time, virtually every field of mainstream human thought became subordinate to the idea that truth was verifiable only through objectively guided investigation. However, the same level of certainty that physicists work with cannot be achieved in a wide spectrum of other human endeavors, such as human behavior.

James Shanteau is an expert on experts. He has spent his entire professional life studying experts. He has found that in fields characterized by absolutely predictable events such as physics, chemistry and engineering, experts far outperform nonexperts. However, in fields that resist absolutely predictable events, such as stock picking, horse picking and human behavior, nonexperts often outperform the experts.

James Surowiecki popularized the term “the wisdom of crowds” in his book by that name. The subtitle of the book is Why the Many Are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, societies and Nations. Chalk one up for “common sense.”

Throughout all my growing up years, through the early and middle years of my life intuition was denigrated as having no value in truth-seeking. In my childhood, comic strips, movies and radio comedy shows like Jack Benny and Fibber McGee and Molly talked about intuition as a woman’s way of figuring things out.

However of late, intuition has been gaining respectability in spite of its being a nonobjective approach to discovering truth. Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink quickly became a best seller in 2005 because the zeitgeist was already experiencing erosion of a several centuries-old objective foundation. Tolerance for subjectively rooted expressions about what is truth and what is not was on a rapid rise. Other books, such as Gary Klein’s Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions – which preceded Blink, and actually a more informative book – have helped give intuition legitimacy in respectable thinking society.

Then comes Wikipedia – a living organic testimony to the veracity that is abundantly present in “the wisdom of the crowds” that often strays wide of objective thinking. Having been the subject of an abundance of criticism for the certain veins of error streaking through its corpus, Wikipedia was subjected to an exhaustive investigation sponsored by the British magazine Nature in 2007. The analysis consisted of in depth comparisons with the Encyclopedia Britannica on the same topics. To the astonishment of many, Wikipedia and Britannica scored about the same for accuracy.

Next: How the Ebbing Value of Expertise Is Changing the Rules of Marketing

 

10 Ideas That Are Changing the World We Live, Work and Play In (Part 2a)

Ego Transcendence: Perhaps the biggest world-changing idea on the planet today, Part 2

Imagine what advertising would look liked if 65 percent of consumers were teenagers. (Of course, sometimes advertising does look like most marketers believe that most consumers are teens.)

What would prevailing fashions look like? How would retail centers look – and sound?

The answers to those questions don’t require a Ph.D. in consumer psychology to arrive at answers. Advertising would be raucous, rude and often vulgar – or hopelessly idealistic, heroic and romantic (with sex oozing from every pixel).

Fashions would be in-your-face, contra adult, ostentatious and audacious. Primary colors would dominate and pastels eschewed. Retail venues would be boisterously alive with sounds, colors, lights and smells. Mannequins would be strewn around sporting eerily weird (by adult standards) visages.

The customary excesses of youth would be metaphorically captured in every heartbeat of commerce. Narcissism – a term inspired by the mythical self-centered Grecian youth who a god turned into a flower – would be celebrated in every commercially framed visual and auditory statement directed to the adolescent majority. Impetuosity would be reflected, embraced and celebrated everywhere.

There would be no ambiguity, no nuance because, as brain scans have now shown, teens live in a world defined by the verb to be. Something either is or is not. There are no shades of gray, no maybe’s, no it depends. The teen brain is remarkable impervious to nuance.

Now imagine what advertising would look liked if 65 percent of adult consumers were 40 and older. Well, actually, you don’t have to image that. Sixty-five percent of adult consumers are age 40 and older.

Same follow on questions: What would prevailing fashions look like? How would retail centers look – and sound?

The answers are a bit more complex. Maybe it doesn’t take a Ph.D. in consumer psychology to come up with the right answers, but it helps a whole lot to know something about how worldviews, attitudes, values, behavior and even cognitive operations progressively undergo dramatic changes beginning around the onset of midlife.

These changes reflect something of a personal paradigm shift  that can begin influencing behavior as early as the mid-thirties and later throughout the forties. However, it appears that people generally begin to become aware of changes in behavior around the early forties.

So, whenever a person first becomes aware of new influences on his or her outlook on life – like deepened awareness of one’s mortality – narcissistic self-centeredness and materialistic influences on outlook and behavior ebb.

In midlife, the normal path of development leads to self-centeredness progressively giving way to others-centeredness. Aspirations link less and less to materialistic values. Lifestyles increasingly reflect desires for simplicity. Youthful tolerance for artifice dissolves in favor of authenticity.

While earlier the worldviews, values and behavior of others – especially peers – was a frequently tapped source of behavioral cues and clues, we grow more comfortable by the year with another source for guidance in our worldviews, values and behavior: ourselves.

During the process of all these changes, we begin to make progress in tending to one Carl Jung’s Seven Tasks of Aging: Letting go of the ego. According to Jung, gaining comfort with aging and dying depends on letting go of the ego – or ego transcendence.

People’s desires to give back, to leave a legacy, to enrich others with no expectation of return reflect the ego in recession.

As much as the zeitgeist would reflect consummate ego projection were society dominated by teens, now that adults 40 and older comprise the adult majority, the zeitgeist increasingly projects the effects of ego transcendence.

The rising influence of the so-called triple bottom line – People, Planet and Profit – draws much of its force from the zeitgeist of an aging society. Notably, philanthropy is growing at an unprecedented pace – double digit annual growth since the early 1990s, when people 40 and older became the adult majority for the first time.

Importantly, consumer trend watchers like Yankelovich, Roper ASW and Harris Interactive all report stronger philanthropic proclivities among Gen Y’ers or Millenials that seen among members of previous generations at the same age. This, along with numerous other traits attributed to younger people, demonstrate the influence of ego transcendence on consumers worldviews, values, aspirations and lifestyles among people of all ages. The implications for marketers are enormous, yet few have homed in on this idea even though it might be the most influential idea of all that is changing the world.

Next in this series: World-changing idea #3: The Ebbing Value of Expertise

10 Ideas That Are Changing the World We Live, Work and Play In (Part 2)

Ego Transcendence: Perhaps the biggest world-changing idea on the planet today.

For more than 3,000 years, values rooted in the masculine soul dominated the civilized world. Polio vaccine discoverer Jonas Salk, who called those values ego values, took note of this in a paper he wrote shortly before his death in 1995.

Ego values, which fuel the competitive spirit in men, have been a driving force behind humankind’s cultural and technological progress over the millennia. However, said Salk, the future of humankind now depends more on cooperation than on competition. The time has come in the name of human survival, he said, for a cultural shift toward being values.

                                   

Ego Values   Dominant for 3,000 years; masculine	Being   Values   Beyond materialism; quality over   quantity; feminine or androgynous
Intellect	Intuition
Reason	Feeling
Objective	Subjective
Morality	Reality
Differences	Differentiation
Competition	Cooperation
Power	Influence
Win-Lose	Win-Win

In essence, Salk was calling for a massive surge of ego transcendence. On an individual basis, ego transcendence is the mark of those existing in an advanced state of psychological maturity. In fact, one of the items on Carl Jung’s Seven Tasks of Aging whose accomplishment leads to a regret-free, peaceful and joyous old age was “letting go of the ego.”

Because people in the second half of life are now the adult majority among the developed world’s one billion people, Salk’s hoped for surge of ego transcendence is underway. Notwithstanding armed conflicts around the world that flow from the muscular expression of ego values, there is very clearly a global movement that is weakening the influence of materialistic self-centeredness that defined advanced cultures of the 20^th century.

Paul Hawkins writes about the global cultural shift toward others-centeredness in his recent book Blessed Unrest. In the business world the idea of ego transcendence is being embraced on an ever broadening front under the notion of the Three P’s – Profit, People and Planet.

It’s curious that Time magazine, in drawing up its list of “10 ideas that are changing the world” missed altogether what is perhaps the strongest idea of all – looking for and finding personal life satisfaction by rising above the ego and joining with fellow beings to promote higher life quality for everyone on the planet.

Nobel Peace Prize laureate (2006) Mohammad Yunus, 69, is a towering example of that others-centered aspiration. For a truly inspiring insight into the mind and heart of this Bangladeshian economics professor, please visit a video presentation of the Charlie Rose segment in which Mr. Rose interviewed Dr. Yunus.

Dr. Yunus believes that fully half of the world’s population of abjectly poor people (less than $1 a day in income) can be eliminated by 2015 – just seven years away, anf that not too long after that abject poverty – like small pox – can be totally eradicated from the earth.

The ranks of those who agree with Dr. Yunus is growing. Twenty years ago he would have been seen as a crank. But now, the success of his microlending program which already has lifted millions of families above abject poverty, has turned him from eccentric crank into a sage of uncommon wisdom.

And Dr.Yunus’s efforts are just one example of how a planet-wide surge of ego transcendence is transforming the human experience, and indeed, possibly us all from apocalyptic disasters.

Next: A sampling of the marketing implications of ego transcendence in the consumer population..