Immersion Active presents Ageless Marketing

Teach Me to Fish - #3: Mother Wisdom on What Aging Is Really About

Teach Me to Fish©, a special ongoing series of marketing insights Invoking the timeless wisdom, "Give a man a fish and he eats for a day; teach him to fish and he eats for a lifetime." Sponsored by Immersion Active, a communications agency for the 21^st century.

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I am part of a group that first came together nearly 20 years ago. It's made up of people who have some connection some connection with the world of aging. The include corporate executives, retired business people, healthcare specialists, marketing experts, real estate developers and professional from consumer advocacy organizations. We go by the simple name The Society. People ask, "The Society of what?" I always answer the question with "The Society of People Who Love People."

That answer may not strike anyone as brilliant, but that's who we are. It's an extraordinary band of friends who meet twice a year.One of our members is an extraordinary person. She has been in my life for 25 years. You may remember her: she wsa weekend host of NPR's All Things Considered for a number of years and otherwise an NPR journalist for a long, long time she says. Her name is Connie Goldman.

We Societans lovingly call Connie Mother Wisdom. She's quite a fishing guide, evcery ready to share with you some angle about life that will make it better for you if you listen to her and follow her guidance. Go to Amazon.com and type Conie Goldman into teh search box. You will bring up a page that has a half a dozen books about life in its second half. The first one I read many years ago:Secrets of Becoming a Late Bloomer: Extraordinary Ordinary People On the Art of Staying Creative, Alive, and Aware in Midlife and Beyond. 

A few posts back I complained about how most markketing gets it wrong with its chronic failure to demonstrate that the company or people really has an understandin of what being older is like. beyond a brand intended for older people ers getting it wrong by not portraying life as it really is. Everyone in marketing or in some field serving people in the second half of life -- 40 and older - would do themselves a huge favor by going fishing with Mother Wisdom, starting with reading Secrets of a Late Bloomer. Or they might start with a little video clip of Mother Wisdom speaking on aging that someone recently sent me. You can acess the video here.Do so and experience the joy of fishing with a masterful guide.

Teach Me to Fish – #2: When Do We Start Class?

Teach Me to Fish©, a special ongoing series of marketing insights Invoking the timeless wisdom, "Give a man a fish and he eats for a day; teach him to fish and he eats for a lifetime." Sponsored by Immersion Active, a communications agency for the 21^st century.

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I read about a disturbing set of statistics last week.

The U.S. now ranks ninth among industrialized nations in the share of its population that has at least a high school degree. In the same age group, It ranks seventh in the share of people with a college degree who hold a college degree.

Ever since Abraham Lincoln pushed through the College Land Grant program in 1862 and up until recently, the U.S. educational system has been the envy of the world. And Americans have justifiably regarded education as investment made by the  generation current in-power in the next generation that keeps America #1 in the world in science, medicine, technology – in nearly every other broad field of human endeavor.

But something has changed. It was vividly described by columnist Kathleen Parker http://tinyurl.com/3mkwhuv in yesterday’s Washington Post. Education is increasingly being regarded by the right of center as matter of elitism. The political message: "Keep your Ivy League paws out of my life. I'm quite self sufficient.".

Parker suggests that “smart money goes to the ‘stupid’ politicians, who are dumb as foxes and happy as clams when their opponents misunderestimate (sic) them.”  In other words the populist politicians who play to America’s growing anti-intellectualism. They are smart enough to know how to play to the intellectual lowest common denominator in America.

So, unlike in previous generations a graduate degree from an Ivy League citadel of knowledge and learning no longer counts for much, especially in the trenches of political battles among the electorate.

There is no question that America has become intellectually a sluggard. Consider this set of stats: In the U.S. for the year 2003, 15-year-olds scored 29^th in math, 12^th in reading and 20^th in science.  

This morning I had a telephone interview with a reporter who asked the question, “What are the differences between younger and older consumers.” I answered, “What are the differences between male and female? If you have to ask the question then you won’t understand the answer. ”

She went on to ask another question, “Why is it that there are now so many older people with lots of discretionary income that marketers are ignoring?” followed by, “What can be done to correct that problem?” Innocent enough sounding questions, but questions that have been answered (either correctly or incorrectly) over the past two decades. They are questions that only a novice would ask. A modicum of research would quickly reveal that they have been knocked around since the early 1990s.

In response to the last question I told the reporter that to correct the problem you have to start with an overhaul of our education systems starting with kindergarten if not earlier. We must bring children through their learning experiences without extinguishing the natural curiosity they have that caused Carl Sagan to observe, “Every child is a scientist.”

We are no longer a nation that loves learning. We have lost sight of the connection between how we educate our young people and our standing in the world. We have relinquished our role as world leader on a growing number of fronts because we have lost our capacity for curiosity and the sense of wonder that we feel when some matter or event pulls us into its magnetic field.

Our human souls have become hostage to a tyranny imposed by undue dominance of the left brain in how we see the world, try to make sense of it and work through problems we come to face.

So, the answer to the reporter’s last question may not be satisfying because it does not lead to quick results. It requires a generation’s bundle of time with concrete results not apparent anytime soon. We must change how we see ourselves and deal with life in a far different way than we’ve become accustomed to.  

All this is grist for the milling of thought that will carry us forward in this blog. By the way, I’m inviting readers to write their own posts in support of this new direction.

Ciao,

David

 

 

 

 rmany, New Zealand and Switzerland.

Teach Me to Fish – #1: In the Beginning ...

Teach Me to Fish©, a special ongoing series of marketing insights Invoking the timeless wisdom, "Give a man a fish and he eats for a day; teach him to fish and he eats for a lifetime." Sponsored by Immersion Active, a communications agency for the 21^st century.

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I’m excited!

A friend questioned me a short while ago, “You’ve been in the marketing game for more than 30 years. What are the three biggest changes in marketing that you’ve seen?”

Ah, but what a challenge! Time to dust off my rearview mirror.

Retrospection is good for the soul. It also can also open doorways to an inexhaustible source of insights that are already resident in your brain but of which you know no awareness.

The journey back through time that my friend’s question prompted has made me realize that I have reached an inflection point that compels action. After eight years and just at  a tad under 500 posts I have grown bored with this blog. I can’t let that be. I must do something about my ebbing enthusiasm in the blogosphere.

I love this blog and all the friends it has introduced me to, so to abandon it is out of the question. I must adapt. Ageless Marketing the Blog needs to be overhauled. That means keeping true to its traditions but expressing itself in a new voice.

In its new incarnation this blog will retain its title, Ageless Marketing. It’s a good title that honors the idea of connecting the dots between people as customers and the matters and values of timeless concern and importance that define them. I will continue that tradition and others as well.

Tradition has become a big word in how I am processing my life these days. Ironically tradition is proving more fruitful than other resources in helping me better see the world, make sense of it and deal with the relentless flow of challenges life brings my way.

So, in examining the story of marketing over the past three decades I am finding that more answers to questions of the day are deeply rooted in how things were than we might have supposed.

No my dear friends, I have not become transformed into a Luddite. Some of you have credited me with picking up a slew of arrows in my back because I am not afraid to venture into new territories of thought. Trust me, if there is any truth to that claim, extracting insights for addressing contemporary problems doesn’t necessarily compromise that repute. In fact, it might become one of the best things I have ever done for my reputation.

I have thought quite a lot about taking a back-to-the-future approach to sizing up and solving many contemporary problems. In fact, I’m writing a new book on the subject. Its title is Brave New Worldview. I argue that gaining greater effectiveness in working through many challenges facing us in the 21^st century depends on “going back to the future” – extracting long-forgotten insights from the past to help us shape the future.

I take the position that as counterintuitive as it may sound, our future depends on relearning critical lessons from our distant past – far distant past. I have spent nearly three years developing this idea on paper (well, in a Word document) and am about ready to bring it out stage, front and center. More shortly …

Predictable Differences in the Worldviews of Younger and Older Consumers

From this posting forward, I plan to intermittently share with readers thoughts drawn from a new book that I will publish later this Fall, Brave New Worldview: The Path to Infinite Possibilities in the 21st Century.

How we view the world and try to make sense of it is based on a worldview that was inspired by Newtonian science three centuries ago. However, just like a modern-day car couldn’t be built with the tools, knowledge and skills of an 18^th century carriage builder, neither can we solve many of today’s challenges by seeing the world in the linear manner of a Newtonian worldview in which the machine is the dominant metaphor of the technological age in which we live.

On a moment-to-moment basis, the world we know is shaped between our ears – more so than we usually take notice of. It originates in our five senses. Thus it is that the world we experience is largely of our own creation. This is not so strange an idea as one might think.[1]

I argue that we can change the world we experience by changing what goes on between our ears. People who experience a sudden religious conversion or other ideological shift know this well. Often, without any prior indication of imminent conversion, the convert’s worldview undergoes a radical transformation.

So, what is a worldview?

It’s a multifaceted lens though which we view reality in our attempts to make sense of it and strive to solve the challenges it presents us. My worldview includes politically ideological facets. It also has facets through which I view my roles as a husband, father, grandfather a general, all-purpose, wide-angle lens through which I try to bring meaning and coherence to my life. My worldview predisposes what I see and how I interpret it.

Speaking more generally, marketers should have a better understanding of worldviews than is customarily the case. This shortcoming shows up with particular clarity in marketing directed to people who are in the second half of life. Given that they now represent the adult majority this is astonishing. Based on my observations, relatively few marketing professionals understand how a 50-year-old’s worldview is different in predictable ways from that of a 25-year-old.

So what is a worldview?

A worldview is dynamic. It continuously evolves. It is endowed with an ever-increasing population of neuro macros that like a computer macro relieve us of having to figure out every new experience from scratch. Above all, a worldview is a cognitive tool without which nothing would make sense.

Science writer Danah Zohar nicely captures the idea of worldview in calling it “A theme which integrates the sense of self, the sense of self and others, and the sense of how these relate to the wider world – to Nature and other creatures, to the environment as a whole, to the planet, the universe, and ultimately to God – to some overall purpose and direction.”[2]

A worldview reminds me of a patchwork quilt. I grew up with a master quilter in my life: my mother. Quilts are a rich part of my childhood memories. I remember the fullness of comfort they gave me on cold winter nights when Mother turned down the thermostat to save money. “Besides, it’s unhealthy to sleep in a hot room,” she said. To make sure that our bedrooms were not too hot, we had to have a window open a few inches. Mother never reconciled the obvious conflict between her belief about the unhealthiness of sleeping in a hot room in winter and the unavoidably hot bedrooms of summertime in our non-air conditioned house.

Most people today are likely to have grown up sleeping under machine-made quilts, and more recently under quilts made in China, instead of being works of folk art pieced together by their mothers. Quilts made in China don’t come with memories. Mother’s quilts were woven memories of family history. Piles of scraps destined for future quilts were stacked around her quilting room. Many of these scraps were left over from clothes she made for her seven children. As an adult, I came to be amazed by Mother’s skill at piecing together wildly disparate colors and patterns into coherent artifacts of elegantly simple beauty.

As with Mother’s quilts, a worldview is fashioned from bits and pieces of real life. A worldview reflects traits we are born with, our life history and themes, the beliefs and values that we’ve internalized and the culture from which we draw our much of our social identity.

The character and content of a worldview is also influenced by the vessel of nerve tissue in which it takes form: the brain. However, each of the brain’s hemispheres forms a strikingly different version of reality. The right hemisphere beholds reality in holistic terms – like seeing the whole quilt, if you will. The left hemisphere is more atomistic. It only sees pieces of the whole quilt. It has little interest in the whole. It would take no notice of the chromatic complementariness in Mother’s quilts. But this is what transformed diverse scraps of cloth into a unified masterpiece. Indeed, her genius only found expression in the whole, not in the pieces.

NEXT: Sampling of predictable differences in the worldviews between younger and older consumers.

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[1] In quantum physics, a phenomenon known as the observer effect refers to changes in a phenomenon generated merely by observing it: Track an electron with a particle detector and it shows up as a particle; track it with a wave detector and – lo and behold – it appears as a wave. In this respect, the act of observation creates what is observed. This runs directly counter to the Newtonian perspective that everything exists objectively, that is, independently of everything else.

[2] Danah Zohar, The Quantum Self: Human Nature and Consciousness Defined by the New Physics, Quill/William Morrow, and p. 232.

What Is Ageless Marketing?

I am asked from time-to-time about what I mean by “ageless marketing” and how is ageless marketing different from boomer marketing, senior marketing, or as the Japanese often refer to marketing to older people, “Silver marketing.”

A speech by CBS Executive Vice President Dave Poltrack is a good place to start talking about what ageless is. He enlightened his audience about the origins of age-based marketing:

In the early years of television, Nielson just provided household ratings without reference to age. Then, encouraged by ABC, a struggling young network at that time that had a smaller but younger audience than its two established competitors, Nielson added the Adult 18-49 demographic to its regular reports.

So, there we have it. Age-based advertising, which is often counterproductive in today’s marketplace, was created to give an also ran network in the early 1960s that had the youngest audience a perceived advantage over its competitors. ABC’s main pitch was “Get them young and before some other brand gets them.”

The only problem with that pitch is that age correlates poorly with customer loyalty. In fact, the young are notorious for their fickleness. Nevertheless, ABC’s pitch worked and Madison Avenue invented age-based marketing.

The emergence of what I call the New Customer Majority has left Madison Avenue up marketing’s creek without a paddle to steer back into today’s mainstream consumer population. Since 1989  people aged 40 and older have been the adult majority. The current media age of adults is now 47.

That presented marketers a big challenge. Everything they had learned about consumer behavior  was learned when the young ruled the marketplace. Their behavior is much different from that of older consumers who now are  the adult majority.

While relatively few consumers make a brand selection at 18 that they are still living with at 49, products do get age stigmatized – associated with a specific age cohort. Cadillac is a good example of a brand that was age stigmatized years ago and despite heavy-lifting efforts in recent years to bring the average age of its owners down hasn’t had a lot of success.

Remember the much lampooned, ill-fated attempts of Oldsmobile to lower the average age of its buyers: “It isn’t your father’s Oldsmobile?”

The problem with age-based marketing is its exclusivity. Older people don’t want a brand that reflects immaturity (Pepsi) and young people don’t want a brand that reflects maturity (Buick – although Buick has made some gains recently in bringing down the average age of its customer base).

Thanks to Madison Avenue’s success in connecting brands with age cohorts, people are generally sensitive to what a brand says about them in terms of age. But matters of age in the marketplace could be different.

The alternative to age-based is ageless marketing – marketing based not on age but on values and universal desires that appeal to people across generational divides. Age-based marketing reduces the reach of brands because of its exclusionary nature. In contrast ageless marketing extends the reach of brands because of its inclusionary focus.

To avoid any misunderstanding, I need to say that targeting specific age groups remains a valid marketing gambit. One of the nation’s most successful ageless marketers, New Balance, does not ignore age. While the core values it reflects in its general marketing are ageless, it targets specific age groups through media selection, content in selected messaging, and in how it manages its channel relationships.

New Balance stocks its retailers with a keen eye on the core age group served by a specific retailer. However, by practicing the art of ageless marketing with the refined skills of a neurosurgeon maneuvering probes through a patient’s brain, New Balance has outpaced its competition – including powerful Nike – in annual sales growth of athletic shoes since the mid-1990s. Its competitors continue to restrict the reach of their brands by sticking with age-based marketing.

Companies with a portfolio of products that are suitable across a wide age spectrum and that are stuck in the age-based marketing mindset of the 1960s need to broaden their reach by transitioning to ageless marketing.  Why? Because the country will continue getting older for the next 15 years or so. The New customer Majority is where both the demographics and the affluence is.

Many companies should evaluate a compromise between age-based marketing and ageless marketing: life stage marketing.

Generically, life stage marketing is not a new idea. But when marketers talk about life stage they virtually always mean social stage, examples of which include school graduation, starting a career, setting up a household, marriage, children, last child moving out and retirement. Life stage in the context I use it refers to psychological developmental stage.

Developmental stage marketing combines the inclusionary objectives of ageless marketing with the exclusionary boundaries of age-based marketing.

For example, invoking a company’s genuine concern for the environment is a value that speaks to people of all ages – including children who bring home what they have learned about the environment at school. They can be very influential on Mom’s buying decisions in certain categories. When that same company presents its message with strong, dramatic  graphics – a message that shouts at you – it will be targeting adolescents and twentysomethings. A message that reflects on future generations will likely be targeting middle age and older people.

Developmental marketing looks at the marketplace in terms of four seasons of life. Each season has its own set of needs that may be somewhat unique to that season. Empty nesters in Fall usually aren’t looking forward to the next PTA meeting. Young parents enjoy getting involved in their children’s lives. Retirees aren’t usually into job retraining.

Each season of life has its own developmental objectives. Time spent in the childhood and adolescents years (Spring) is focused on preparation for adulthood.  Fantasy and play are the narrative themes of Spring and have a large role in defining the needs and desires of children and adolescents.

The young adulthood years (Summer) are concerned with social and vocational development. Most approach these years with a heady appetite for adventure and project a strong sense of the romantic and heroic. Again, the life stage characteristics of this season predispose the nature of a person’s needs.

Midlife (Fall) is about refining and developing the inner self with a major question being, “What is the purpose of my life). People begin looking less to material accoutrements for life’s pleasure and more to experiential pursuits. They also begin thinking in terms of “giving back.”

Finally, the lions and lionesses of Winter look to continue the simplification of life that they began in Fall and coming to terms with what faces them in the last quarter of life. They also expand the spectrum of experiences to which they look for enhancement of life satisfaction. Interestingly, research has shown that concerns about aging, health and one’s mortality tends to be greater for people in their 40s and 50s than for people in their 60s and 70s.

At the end of the day, the marketing approach needs to be guided by the nature of the brand and the market. Not news, by any means, but so often ignored. Some brands are best developed in the market’s mind within the context of universal values. Hallmark does a great job at this. It sells love, certainly a universal value.

The images of other brands are best those associated with specific developmental stages. Toyota is good at this. Then there are those brands that are best marketed to social stage. Sears does a credible job here. Rarely is it best to build a brand’s image in the marketplace around age. Pepsi is one of the most notable practitioners of this approach – everyone associates the Pepsi Generation with youthhood.

Maslow 101 PART 6: Why Seniors Don't Buy Your Ads

As people move into the higher  levels of personality development they become increasingly “resistant to enculturation,” Maslow said. In the context of marketing this means that older customers tend to become less influenced by traditional advertising.

Having seen and listened to tens of thousands of ads over their lifetimes it is not likely that you are going to come up with an ad that an older person views as startlingly original.

So how do you get the older customer’s attention in ads?

By doing the familiar in an uncommon way, provided of course that the customer is qualified for and has a generic interest in the product for which the ad is being done.

 What do I mean by “uncommon way?”

First, I mean an ad without hyperbole. Go ahead and talk about the product if you want but do it without exaggeration. But don’t present the product as being in a superior class all by itself. Older customers generally don’t need or want to be told that an advertised product is peerless. They’ve heard this pitch so many times it is no longer believable or at best, a cliché.  

Second, by “uncommon way” I mean an ad whose message is uncommonly authentic. This is not a trivial thing. As I wrote in my first book on older markets more than 20 years ago, “Like dogs and children, older people tend to have a sixth sense about a person’s real feelings about them.” To claim that the producers of the product you are doing an ad for really care for their customers doesn’t come across as authentic.

Third, by "uncommon way" I mean connecting with older people's values. The one thing that people in advanced stages of maturity usually have faith in is their values and what they believe in. So, in creating marketing messages for older people talk about them and what they stand for. By aligning the values conveyed by your message with their values you will more likely get them to read what you say and take an interest in consider the product that you are promoting.

Third, by “uncommon way” I mean a message that does not idealize aging or aging people by invoking images that are connected to life as a younger person. In the first place, as I said in a recent post, a Duke University study found that people in their 70s were more likely than people in their thirties to express satisfaction with their lives. Many will not read messages that talk about “reclaiming youthful vitality” as being one of the benefits of the advertised product.

Finally, by “uncommon way” I mean a message that does not focus on the older person in a self-centered basis. Self-centeredness is more common among younger people and runs deeper. Older people tend to think more of others and about their legacy and the ultimate meaning of their lives. Ego-centered ads tend to turn off many older customers.

In summary, when creating messages for older customers, be real in product claims, be authentic in message style and content, connect with their values,and don’t invoke the values of a self-centered person.

Keep in mind as you ponder the last point in the foregoing summary that for years many boomer “experts” predicted that the “Me” generation would enter old age as self-indulgent consumers. That is not proving to be true. For instance, even though we are experiencing the toughest economic picture since the Great Depression, philanthropy has been on the rise as the population gets older.  "Giving back" is a major theme in many older people's lifestyles and aspirations. 

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.

 

 

 

Maslow 101 PART 3: Connecting Your Brand with Your Older Customer's God Spot

UC San Diego neurologist V. S. Ramachandran has mapped some of the most mysterious regions of the mind. A few years ago announced that he had discovered what he called the “God spot ,“ a tiny spot in the frontal lobes of the brain that became hyper active when people have a strongly felt spiritual experience.

Now it seems that strong brand experiences activate the same spot. In fact, brands that are commonly referred to as cult brands appear to earn that distinction only by learning how to gain entry to a consumers’ God spot. Click here to see the Fast Company article on the similarities between strong brand affiliation and deeply felt  religious experiences.

The article brought to mind what Maslow referred to as “peak experiences” which he described as the highest moments of happiness and fulfillment. They have  a mystical, orgasmic” quality he said. They are the equivalent of what I have called “Being experiences” throughout my writings over the years.

I first defined Being experiences in my 1990 book Serving the Ageless Market as:

Experiences that tend to enhance a sense of connectedness, sharpen one’s sense of reality, and increase one’s sense of appreciation for life. In their most emotionally rewarding occurrences, these experiences involve actions benefitting others or actions that contribute to inner personal growth.

Everyone at least occasionally has Being or peak experiences, however generally speaking only older people’s aspirations – mostly 60 and older according to Maslow – pursue these experiences as a matter of course. They play a major role in how many older people shape their expectations of life. As such, they represent a state of being that is commonplace only among people who are at least well-along the road to self-actualization.

Despite the overarching importance in older people’s lives marketing messages to older markets are dominated by materialistic and egocentric values more common to younger people. I will continue to discuss the characteristics of people whose values and life aspirations have become less materialistic and more experiential or spiritual in upcoming posts. In the meantime learn how to avoid the values of younger people in marketing communications and instead connect with the peak or Being experience values of older people.  In other words, learn how to connect your brand with your older consumer’s God spot.

 

Requisite Course for Marketers to Older People: Maslow 101 PART 2

Sixty-two year-old Kathy Sparks is not simply a 30-year older version of her 32-year-old self. In many respects she’s a different person. That poses a problem for the 32-year-old copywriter or ad creative trying to fashion a marketing message aimed at Kathy and her age peers.

A true story illustrates the point.

While conducting a workshop in 1996, the year the first boomers turned 50, I asked for two volunteers, one born in 1946 and another born in 1964, the bookends of the “boomer generation.” A balding man, a bit wide of girth, approached the podium.  A trim, well-groomed 32-year-old man followed him. Before I could say anything, someone from the audience got the point and shouted, “They’re twins!

As peals of laughter ebbed, I asked each man to talk about his plans for the next five years. The 32-year-old said he wanted to get into the top echelons of his company, buy a bigger house, and start working a few less than his customary 12 to 14 hours a day. The 50-year old in effect said, “Been there, done that. I’m easin’ up now. Making my life simple.  Gonna retire in a few years and I’d like to get some practice now.”

Each man was at a very different time of life, with different aspirations and goals, yet both are called boomers, supposedly having much in common because, we’re told over and over, “boomers were shaped by the same events growing up.”

I can’t imagine any developmental psychologist seeing any constructive meaning in the marketing application of the term “boomer generation.” About the only ones who do are marketers and their clients. Erik Erikson, who created one of the most influential stage-of-life constructs or Abraham Maslow would certainly see nothing of merit in the term.

As generally used in marketing “stage of life” refers to such events as school graduation, first job, marriage, the coming of children, divorce, empty nester status and retirement. These are social stages of life. While they do predispose to some extent people’s needs (households with a baby buy diapers), they have far less influence on the qualitative aspects of a person’s behavior than psychological stage of life.

For example, our 32-year-old boomer and 50-year old boomer both had personal transportation needs. They may even have had the same likes in vehicles. Let’s say they each can afford and like Lexus sedans. However, the differences in values they bring to their decisions are different. The 32-year-old’s values are likely infused with materialism. He probably sees his Lexus as a symbol of who he is, what he’s accomplished and where he is headed. He bought it and drives it with an eye cast outward to catch others’ reactions.

In contrast, the 50-year old boomer’s affection for his Lexus is likely more experiential. He’s not so concerned with making social statements with his Lexus. High on the list of motivators to buy a Lexus was comfort, convenience, aesthetics and the core values of the manufacturer and its agents. This is not to say that the younger boomer is uninfluenced by those motivators. There, the younger boomer’s motivations are likely to more strongly reflect social influences than those of the older boomer.

I’ve read in articles and heard from podiums the misguided advice to not place as much value on social stage-of-life factors as once made sense. The idea is that once only young people had new, growing families. Today you see 50 and even 60-year olds with pre-elementary school children.  The implication is that a 60-year-old new dad is like a 32-year-old new dad. But the older father of a young child is generally more inclined to a deeper sense of awe and wonder in pondering the new life he has sired.

The development of an organism has been described as “Movement from a lower and simpler state to a higher and more complex state. “  That certainly applies to humans. Maslow once observed that an infant enters this world with a mission to become ever more human.  In other words, we are programmed by our genes to develop in the direction of higher states of being and complexity.

In Maslow’s view, the first three levels of basic needs in his famous hierarchy (physiological, safety and security, and love and belonging) are about deficits and their fulfillment. The next two levels (self esteem and the esteem of others, and self-actualization) are about growth. People think differently, he noted, when their lives are dominated by deficit needs than when growth needs have become the first order of business.  He spoke of D-cognition and B-cognition (B for Being) in referring to differences in how people think, according to whether their aspirations are need-dominated or growth-dominated.

In the next post I will discuss some of these differences. They are unambiguous and crucial to getting messages to older people right every time.