Immersion Active presents Ageless Marketing

Maslow 101 PART 5: It’s Not About Nostalgia; It’s About Life Review

 

This post is a modification of one that ran originally May 25, 2007. It fits within the theme of the current thread, Maslow 101, because one of the most important claims he made about self-actualizing personalities is that they experience changes in value systems.
I’ve heard marketers tell audiences from the podium that values remain constant throughout life.  That’s necessary to retain a personality that behaves in consistent fashion. Well, that may sound logical, but it’s wrong. Values change as time and experience change in our lives. What we expect from life changes as the years add up. We look less to materialistic sources for life satisfaction and more toward experiential sources, less to self-indulgence and more toward helping others. Even the past looks different from the present it once was.
Growing old is not about experiencing declines and losses and ways of softening the impact of aging on our mental and physical systems. It does not call for aging creams and beefed up exercise routines and saying no to a bowl of Haagan Dazs ice cream when you really want it. It is about continuing your personal development. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Basic Human Needs is based on the premise that personal development is a lifelong effort. This becomes apparent to people who have gone through an orderly life review.

If you tell me your stories, I will tell you mine, and together we will bear witness to the value of the struggle.

Julien Ryner

Nostalgia is becoming ever bigger in marketing. Radio stations devote playlists entirely to music of three, four or more decades ago. The PT Cruiser was an unabashed attempt to capture the 1930s in its design. Retro is appearing everywhere as marketers look for the key to boomers’ wallets.

But approaching boomers through the lavender mists of nostalgia is not the only way – or even the best way to get their attention. After all, we should not forget F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wry comment that “Nostalgia is a sentimental remembrance of things that never happened.”

Ameriprise’s clumsy attempt to reach boomers through invoking the tumultuous 1960s and ‘70s came to be regarded by many boomers as an exercise in pandering. No, nostalgic reveries are generally better left to the individual than to a squad of advertising creatives.

On the other hand, the second of Carl Jung’s Seven Tasks of Aging – life review – can have a deeper effect on many people than nostalgia does, especially the older they are.

Life review involves a critical examination of one’s life leading toward reconciliation between the sweet and the sour in life. It is a process for removing regret and anger from one’s worldview.

Writer Julien Ryner captures the essence of life review in talking about her experience in helping seniors develop their life stories:

In the eight years I've spent encouraging seniors to write about their lives, not a single individual has rejected the life discovered when examined. The irony of the search is that, in looking, we find self-understanding, and through this new understanding, we find self-acceptance and peace of mind.

Ryner and others with intimate familiarity of the life review process have seen the healing effects of confronting issues long since buried in the psyche that call for attention. Experienced life review docents have a different picture of aging boomers than many self-styled “boomer experts” have.

Remember – the most important things a marketer should know about boomers cannot be learned learn through traditional research methods. Deep understanding depends on knowledge of adult development in the later years. If you haven't turned 60 yet, and have never delved into the field of adult development in the later years, chances are you have some learning to catch up on.

I’ve been told that one of America’s best known boomer gurus advised Ameriprise on its ill-fated nostalgia campaign. There was a bit of irony in that outcome, given that this "expert" on aging boomers is a boomer. However, being a boomer – even having been a participant in love-ins, peace protests and round the clock rocking partying – doesn’t guarantee that you understand your peers – or even yourself.

But representing the past in the context of Jung’s task of life review is a matter quite different from wallowing in nostalgic reverie. Pursuit of this task is not about turning over in one's mind mawkish depictions of one’s youth, Instead, it's about abstemious reflections on life during the highly charged years of life's summer. This mandate for this task is not to relive the past, but to seek a keener understanding of the self by viewing the past through a translucent lens ground by the grit of life experiences. The operative word here is reality.

 

Maslow 101 PART 4: The Joys of Old Age Are Real

I dedicate this post to a friend whose last name will go unmentioned to preserve his privacy, but he will know who he is as he reads on.

In talking to  my friend on the phone the other day he said to me, “ I recently turned 73 and you know – I’ve changed. Things don’t bother me like they used to. I’ve gotten more patient and time doesn’t mean the same as it used to.  It’s like I have all the time in the world and yet at 73 I know I have less of it than ever.”

I responded, “Congratulations, Jim. You have successfully made it into the ranks of the “truly ageless society.”  

I wrote about truly ageless people in the last chapter of my book, Ageless Marketing. These are people who have made it far up Maslow’s Hierarchy of Basic Needs toward self-actualization. In describing such personalities he spoke of them as being more tolerant  -- they don’t get as riled over little things as they used to – and have more patience. And he spoke of how their sense of time has changed:  Paradoxically, “A minute is a day and a day is a minute.”

It is doubtful that very many 33-year-olds – or 43-year-olds for that matter – can very easily understand how my friend can be so sanguine about life as he approaches his mid-70s. However, a recent issue of The Economist  reported that  a Duke University study found that 70-year-olds generally reported themselves as being happier with their lives than 30-yeasr-olds did.

How can it be that a person with about only a dozen years left in his life expectancy (at 73 a man’s life expectancy is about another 12 years), can find himself happiest he’s ever been about his life? If you can’t understand that and you’re in marketing or otherwise dealing with older people you need to study up on “the truly ageless market.”

And if you don’t understand how many people reach higher states of happiness in later life then you are not clicking with them in your marketing messages or in serving them as you might – and not of the least importance you are missing the real joy that people who do understand how older people can reach the summits of happiness in later life experience.

Of course not everyone reaches such auspicious levels of life satisfaction as my friend has reached. The population of older people who still grieve over loss of youthhood, are steeped in regrets and taste bitterness day in and day out in their lives is not a small population for sure. But I believe that most older people who are not still struggling with meeting basic human needs at Maslow’s first three levels (basic physiological, basic safety and security and basic love and belonging) do enter the realm of the truly ageless market.

Members of the truly ageless market experience increased life satisfaction because they have moved largely beyond harm’s way. That happens when people begin to experience an increasing sense of timelessness in their lives, as my friend reported experiencing. This does not mean that frailty, ill health and loss will pass them by as they grow older. In fact, part of the reason such issues as mortality and health become less worrisome to people like mmy friend Jim is they have become more realistic about life and have acquired an ability to deal with the inevitable.

One can speculate about why many people experience increased happiness and satisfaction with life as they age, but no one really knows why this is. Some attribute it to people becoming more spiritual, but atheists report having the same experience. Others attribute it to the mind learning how to compensate for the inevitable declines and losses of old age. My own view is that it’s just another step forward in human growth and development.

In any event, Maslow and others have observed that old age can be a great time of life – and for many people, a time when the joys of life flow with a constancy that they did not experience when they were young.

So, if you are in the business of serving and marketing to the older crowd you might find it to everyone’s benefit to determine whether you are coming at your tasks from the perspective of a 33-year-old or a 73-year-old. Does your marketing literature, for example, stress feeling young again? That’s ageist, not ageless.

Are you showing older people with the goofy looks of the men in Cialis ads as they hold hands with their beloved in an adjacent bath tub? Your garden variety 73-year-old doesn’t look as sex the same way as the people who craft the Cialis ads. In fact, Maslow reported that self-actualizers spoke of sexual experience as becoming less erotic and more spiritual in later life, promoting thereby greater satisfaction.

Success in older markets depends on connecting with them through their worldview which means the younger members of your marketing and service team need to learn how to shift away from the worldview of the young to  see the world as my friend Jim has come to see it.

A good place to start is with Helen Luke's book Old Age. Written in her later years, a more poetic yet startlingly realistic view of aging has rarely if ever been written.