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Teach Me to Fish--#4: The Common Error of Seeing the World as We Want It

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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Two weeks ago, the world of experimental physics was rocked to its core by one of the most explosive events in memory, if not for all time. Einstein’s revolutionary formula, E=mc², turns out to be not so impervious to flaws than believed since 1906. Apparently, according to researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, commonly known as CERN, in Switzerland, particles can move faster than light.

What in the world are we to make of this? Are there more such surprises that lie ahead in the cosmology of the universe? Does it all end with a new definition of eternity? As Dorothy said to Toto, “We’re not in Kansas, anymore.” Where are we?

We learned in the last century that reality is closer to how Einstein saw than the way we see it in our daily lives. He said, “Reality is an illusion”—but a very persistent one. According to Einstein, for over three hundred years, we based our world views, our beliefs, our religions, our politics, on a fictional account of reality. In the later two thousands, we experienced a huge quantum leap in our understanding of the world. We are no longer constrained by the limits of certainty. According to Eisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, there is no certainty.

How do we navigate a world that is governed by science that we don’t understand, a cosmology that is incomprehensible, and even in very question of reality itself?

Now you may think all of this is beyond an ordinary person’s consideration. But it’s not. There was a time when priests spent endless hours trying to figure out a world that ultimately did not appear to exist. We solved this in the Age of Animism—an age in which animal spirits ruled the world. To them, their animistic world was as real as you think your world today is. Later, ecclesiastical forces stepped into the human picture to define the world in ecclesiastical terms. And their world was more real than the world that preceded them but less real than the world that followed them. Now we are on the threshold of yet another new world, one that I write about in my new book, Brave New Worldview. In previous periods, when we experienced major paradigm shifts in how people saw the world, witches were burned, priests were defrocked, clerics were excommunicated, following which we moved into the ecclesiastically inert world of Newtonian science.

For three hundred years or so, the Newtonian worldview has dominated how we see the world. We have accepted this domination willingly because it seemed more real, more palpable, more measurable, more provable than the squishy, indefinite world of the Church. We erroneously felt  the Newtonian world to be a world of certainty. Now we are about to enter a new age, one in which uncertainty is the rule. Chaos is the order of the day. It is a fast-moving, quickly changing world in which there are seemingly no boundaries to what can happen (like exceeding the speed of light).  People ask me, how will we adjust to such a world, in which certainty is non-existent? The answer is rather simple, actually. We accept the fact that uncertainty, rather than certainty, is the natural order of nature, despite three centuries of trying to create a world that conforms to our images of what it should be, we now must move towards a world that collaborates with us in creating the world we all would like to be a part of.

We’re already seeing major changes in how business is being done, in how marketing is being done, in how just about everything is being done. Of course, visually, yesterday looks pretty much like today. But not in reality. That’s an illusion. In my next several posts, I want to introduce readers to new and challenging ways to see the world, as it changes before our very eyes. I urge you to stay interested and hope you find the conversation will continue as it brings new insights into your life. That, after all, is the purpose for this series within the framework of “Teach a man to fish.”

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.

 

 

Requisite Course for Marketers to Older People: Maslow 101

Odds are that nearly every reader of this blog has at least a fuzzy familiarity with Maslow’s famous Hierarchy of Basic Human Needs. To recall, they are:

• Self-actualization
• Self=esteem and esteem of others needs
• Love and belonging needs
• Basic safety and security needs
• Basic physiological needs

Maslow’s said that a person must experience “substantial gratification” at one level before advancing to a higher level. For example the newborn infant’s basic needs are first and foremost “basic psychological needs." As the infant grows and develops  needs of a higher order  begin to emerge.

Borrowing a term from Kurt Goldstein, Maslow called the highest order of basic human needs “self-actualization.” The term stands for a person’s basic need to reach his or her fullest potential.

According to Maslow, very few people ever reach a full state of self-actualization – he estimated that only about 2 percent of us ultimately reach a full state of self-actualization. The rest of us may experience the processes of self-actualization in varying degrees but do so while lower level needs remain the dominate focus of our attentions.

Maslow said that he rarely encountered anyone under the age of 60 who had reached a full state of self-actualization and despite his lifelong career at Brandeis University he claimed to have met only one college age person whom he considered to have reached full self-actualization.

Though few people reach full self-actualization those who otherwise get closest are older people who have enjoyed substantial gratification in the four lower levels of basic human needs. Given that, it only makes sense that marketers working in older markets stand to benefit from at least a Maslow 101 level of understanding of the older psyche.

The fact that most marketing messages either project values associated with lower level needs or fail to reflect the transcendent values of self-actualization suggests that relatively few marketers have a Maslow 101 level of understanding of the older people to whom they direct their marketing messages.

It stands beyond any need to defend the proposition that marketing success rises or falls according to the marketer’s understanding of the customer’s worldview, values and aspirations. However, this basic need of marketing cannot be satisfied by asking customers about such issues. Few people know themselves well enough to give a marketer the answer he or she wants.

The understanding of the older psyche that every marketer working in older markets wants is rooted in empirical research. While Maslow actually did little empirical research he was gifted with an awesome level of intuitive insight about human behavior, others have investigated many of his insights in empirical studies.

Beginning with this post I will present a Maslow 101 course in older people’s behavior.  For sure, Maslow is not the only source of intelligence on older consumers’ behavior, but in my judgment his work offers one of the best starting points for cutting through the fog of myths and misconceptions about older people and their motivations that prevail in marketing.

 

Howard Schultz's Starbucks Tale, Onward, Is a Page Turner

I think that few people in the marketing game really understand the art and science of branding. If that were not true we wouldn’t see the biggest and sharpest agencies in the country launching a New Coke or “It’s not your father’s Oldsmobile” campaign. But one person who does understand what branding is all about is Howard Schultz, the co-founder of Starbucks.

In his new book Onward, Schultz clearly shows a deep understanding of brand husbandry.  Prior to the Crash of 2008, when Starbucks was flying high on Wall Street, Schultz, who had retired from the CEO position,  knew something was not right with the Starbucks brand. He revealed so in a now famous email to Starbucks management that was leaked in February 2007.

In reading what for me was a page turner I almost felt as though I was in Howard’s living room hearing him talk about Starbuck’s running off the track and his efforts to put it back on course. It has all the makings of a business classic written from a highly humanistic point of view.

Why Marketers Need to Tell Stories in Older Markets

You and I don’t think alike. No two people do. How we think is as individualistic as our fingerprints.

How we think is influenced by our unique genome, unique life story, our current circumstances, our environment, our worldview  and finally, the level of maturation we’ve attained. All in all too many sources of variables for a perfect match between how you think and how I think.

Of course we may be compatible in our respective thinking by virtue of similar orientations. We may both be liberal or conservative, of the same religion and generally in unison on how we approach life. But there will always be differences. In fact how you think is not only different from how I think. It’s is different from how you thought as a child or even 10 years ago.

Henri Bergson observed that, “To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.”  You think differently today than you did a year ago because you have creating yourself endlessly.

All of this is by way of laying a foundation for my argument  in this post that is a huge cognitive gap exists between a 35-year old copywriter and a 65-year-old consumer. The result is that very little advertising aimed at older people reflects the way they think because the young copywriter sees the world through the lens of – well, a 35-year-old.

This gap can never be fully closed but it can be considerably if the 35-year-old makes it his or her business to learn as much as they can about how a 65-year old thinks.

I mentioned in my last post about how as we age we tend o experience an increase in right brain participation in our mental functions. The right brain is as different from the left brain in how it sees and makes sense of life as you and may be in our how we think.

Roger Sperry won the Nobel prize for his study of patients whose right and left hemispheres have been surgically separated to inhibit life threatening grand mal seizures. After a number of experiments he concluded “… both the left and the right hemisphere may be conscious simultaneously in different, even in mutually conflicting, mental experiences that run along in parallel.”

It would seem then that increased activity in the right brain in later life would result in changes in worldviews, values and what people expect from life. It also appears likely that a different style of communications is needed to connect with the right brain than the style that best connects with the left brain.

More specifically, the mechanistic, analytic reasoning left brain wants facts and prefers them in clear, unambiguous terms. The emotional, intuitive right brain is less interested in details than in the total picture. The left brain sees things in terms of categories; the right brain in terms of relationships.

Stories. Stories. Stories. The right brain loves stories. The left brain couldn’t care less – in fact in its impatience to get to the point directly and fast, stories are bothersome. On the other hand the right brain turns a deaf ear to declartive statements filled with facts and product claims.

The right brain also likes metaphor s – images of one thing that remind one of something else. It helps the right brain’s comprehension of a matter or brings the matter home more vividly. This overcomes the right brain’s very limited language abilities – you know – a picture is worth a thousand words to the right brain  literally. It’s important to know, however, that the left brain, endowed with powerful language skills, is unable to decipher metaphors.

So the lesson in all of this is that as the older brain moves to the right, the marketer must also do so in how he or she develops communications for older markets.

 

 

On Self-Actualization and Older Markets

 In my book, Serving the Ageless Market (McGraw-Hill 1990) I went out on the proverbial limb: I said that as we age more mental activity is taken over by the right hemisphere of the brain. I found myself in that arboreal perch because A) no one had ever studied the matter and B) I am not a brain researcher.

If I were right, however, it would mean that in marketing to older customers marketers needed to make significant changes from how communicated with younger customers. If I were wrong – well, thankfully I wasn’t.

Research since 1990 has confirmed my claim about the shift toward the emotional, intuitive, holistic right brain.

The backstory on my conclusion: The name Kurt Goldstein is prominent in Maslow’s writings. Goldstein was  a German neurologist (1879 – 1965). Contrary to common belief Goldstein , not Maslow, coined the term “self-actualization.” He used it in referring to brain-damaged soldiers who appeared to experience accelerated personality development to levels normally not reached by people until their later 50s and 60s. Goldstein said they self-actualized decades ahead of schedule.

Maslow drew on Goldstein in the development of his famous Hierarch y of Basic Human Needs, capping it off with self-actualization as the highest level of basic human needs.

Before coming across Goldstein’s name in Maslow’s writings, I had read about the work of American neurobiologist Roger Sperry. Sperry earned the Nobel prize for his studies of patients whose brain hemispheres had been surgically separated to prevent life threatening grand mal seizures. For the first time researchers were able to study the hemispheres separately in living human beings.

One day, while reading Maslow’s detailed description of self-actualizing personalities I was suddenly struck by the fact that Maslow’s list of attributes of self-actualizing personalities squared remarkably with Sperry’s description of specialty functions in the right brain. Since that day I have believed that research into the medical records of Goldstein’s patients would reveal that his self-actualizing patients had sustained left brain injuries in the battlefield. That would in many cases cause an increase mental activity in the right hemisphere to pick up the slack caused by the left brain’s injuries.

I became even surer of my conclusion about the rightward cerebral shift in later life when some years ago a friend who was in his early-30s suffered a terrible accident on his bike while pedaling to work one day. He suffered massive brain injuries that kept him into a coma for five months. Michael was a brilliant engineer who had been part of the team that developed the world’s first automated subway fare card system in the world in Washington, D.C.

The accident resulted in putting Michael on full disability, though the casual observer would see nothing  pointing to that.

I was talking to Michael several years after the accident about how his life was unfolding. He began listing various things he could no longer do. It added up to the fact that the  accident had dissolved the analytic abilities necessary to his work in engineering. But he went on to startle me with the statement, “I feel as though I grew much older as a result of the accident. I feel that I think like an old man must think.”

He elaborated. “I used to see the world in black and white. Now I see it in shades of gray.” Indeed I had observed the transition. He went on,” This is causing considerable problems between me and Jennifer. She still sees the world in black and white.”

“Michael, was your brain injury in the left hemisphere?” I asked.

“Yes,” he replied.

_______________

All this gives rise to a seminal question: Is the later life shift into self-actualization a compensation for age onset deficits in the left hemisphere? Some researchers think so. One described the phenomenon as being like needing two hands to carry a heavy bucket of water in old age while one hand was quite enough earlier in life. However, I think he was wrong. But I do not believe the shift is necessarily compensatory. Instead, I believe it is a normal outcome of the human developmental process.

Not everyone attains the level of self-actualization. Reaching a higher level of maturation, according to Maslow, requires significant satisfaction in preceding levels. Thus if a person is still struggling to satisfy “love and belonging” needs (or higher up, “self-esteem and esteem from others”), he or she cannot reach the final and highest stage of development, self-actualization.

That is not to say that people lower down in Maslow’s famous hierarchy do not have self-actualization needs at their current level of development that cannot be satisfied. That’s a good thing for San Francisco-based boutique hotelier Chip Conley. He claims to have saved his company, Joie de Vivre, from bankruptcy during the dotcom crash of 2001 by  focusing on meeting self-actualization needs of investors, employees and customers .  He tells all about it in Peak: How Great Companies Get their Mojo from Maslow. 

Marketers only achieve peak success by meeting customers’ needs in a big way. This being the case, and over half the population is now in the second half of life, marketers need to learn more about self-actualization needs and make connections with them in marketing communications.

But alas! I rarely see marketing communications directed to older audiences that addresses self-actualization needs. Presumably that’s because there is a pervasive lack of understanding of self-actualization in the marketing world. In my own little way I want to help remedy that.

In my next post I will delve into self-actualization in greater detail and its importance to marketers in communicating with consumers in the second half of life..

Rightward Ho!

Today's’ markets have a stronger right brain orientation than younger markets of the past. This is because the majority of adult consumers are now over the age of 40, when mental activity in the right hemisphere of the brain tends to increase. This is a critical factor in creating messages for older markets because the brain’s right hemisphere sees things differently than the left hemisphere does.

The left hemisphere sizes things up in words. It’s the brain’s word processor. The right hemisphere perceives reality in images – in sensory images to be more precise.

The right  brain’s larger role in the formation of perceptions, thoughts and decisions in older minds increases the importance of conveying information through sensory information – sights, sounds, aromas, tastes and touch.

But how does one convey nonvisual sensory information in a print ad? By creating multisensory word pictures. Even though the right brain has only rudimentary word processing skills, it draws on image-associated words to key the formation of sensory images.

For instance, consider onomatopoeia – words that imitate the sounds they represent, such as words like splash, wow, gush, kerplunk and tinkle. Coupling those words to visual images of a dog jumping into a family pool, a kid opening his much hoped for Christmas present, a fire hose, a stone dropped in water, or an antique shop door being opened by a customer all create multisensory word pictures.

For good reason we call attention to the idea that “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Standing as abstract representations of reality, words generally are less evocative of emotions than images are. Sensory images are far more effective in this regard. And of course, the stronger the emotional responses generated by a message, the greater attention the message is likely to get.

Generating emotionally strong responses is more critical in older markets than in younger ones because older minds depend more on emotions (gut feelings, a.k.a., intuition) in forming perceptions, thoughts and decisions than younger minds do.

The stronger right brain bias of older consumers also increases their responsiveness to messages conveyed through stories as opposed to declarative statements. Stories generally do a better job of emotionally engaging older minds than  declarative statements do. In fact, older consumers are more likely than younger consumers to ignore a message that simply describes a product with little or no affect.

The rightwards shift in mental activity that is associated with older minds promotes a number of crucial changes in how older people see the world and try to make sense of it. In the next post I will discuss more of these changes and their implications for marketing.  

Why Old Age Is Really Not For Sissies

In the last several posts I have challenged the “hucksters of longevity” as Judith Viorst calls those who purvey “the untruth that no one need fear growing old anymore because science - any day now - is going to fix whatever it is that ails us.”

Viorst makes that statement in a review of Susan Jacoby’s new book, Never Say Die. Jacoby’s book is  a broadside indictment of the legions of marketeers who are trying to cash in on the population  explosion taking place among those 65 and older by connecting the products they hawk to heavily varnished images of old age.

If you are involved in anyway in marketing to people in their 60s and beyond, you may find the reading of this book to be a bit uncomfortable, but you should also find it an enlightening and productive reading experience. It will not an experience that quite squares with the AARP image o aging. Remember, it was AARP that came up with the expression, "30 is the new 50."

Nonsense, says Jacoby, and according to Viorst makes a good case for why AARP is wrong on that account and is not working in older people's best inerest in promoting such a view.

Jacoby exhorts us to grow up and accept aging as it really is, not as some 30-year-old copywriter who is terrified by the idea of turning 40 sees it. I see a lot of advertising directed at older people that I judge as being counterproductive – that is, it will more like repel older consumers than attract them.

Try and imagine life as most 70-year-olds experience it instead of how you would like it to be for you.  You likely have at least five chronic conditions and if you are a woman, a good chance of having a parent you must care for and quite possibly a husband who has needs you must attend to.

You are supposed to be retired but an incredible amount of your time is spent taking your aging parent (or parents!) and maybe your spouse to doctor appointments. Perhaps sitting in a doctor’s waiting room one day you pick a magazine and start thumbing through it. Suddenly you come across an ad for a retirement community. It beckons you with some trite headline like, “Fallen Oak Estates  – retirement as it should be.” You slam the magazine shut in disgust. “What do ‘they’ know about life in the retirement years.”

 If you are in your 30s or even 40s the picture of old age that Jacoby draws probably confirms a bias that you have against old age. But if you’ve read the previous posts on this subject you’ll recall studies I mentioned that revealed people in their 70s reporting a higher incidence of happiness than people in their 30s and 40s did. Is it that people in their 70s tend to be self-delusional?  No, it’s more the case that the gap between what they expect from life and what they get from life tends to be narrower than it is for many younger people.

Jacoby’s book is long makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of old age that is very much in keeping with the great gerontologist Robert Butler’s perspective on aging, as Jacoby’s reviewer Viorst reminds us: Butler said, “I'd love nothing more than to wake up one morning and read a newspaper article announcing a cure for Alzheimer's. But we have to plan for aging as it is - not as it might be if a magic potion appears. . . ."

Read Viorst’s review here.

Buy Never Say Die: The Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age here.

The Mighty Struggle for Authenticity in Marketing to Seniors

Several years ago personal products marketer Dove kicked off a campaign that stunned the marketing world. It featured models sporting freckles, birthmarks and even wrinkles. One model was a 93-year-old African American woman. It was called the Real Beauty campaign.

The Real Beauty campaign was an instant success, pushing sales into the double digit column first in Europe where it was launched, followed by the UK and ultimately in the U.S.

Real Beauty defied the marketing tradition of featuring models as stunning beauties when promoting personal products. It is axiomatic among marketers that women will be more responsive to ads showing beautiful women than ads that show women like themselves.

But Dove was on to something. Consumers really did appreciate authenticity. It found in surveys that only about 2 percent of women regarded themselves as beautiful. This meant that to nearly every woman personal product ads do not project reality.

Dove was so convinced that it had made the discovery of the century in consumer behavior that it launched a new campaign aimed at older women in which it treated aging as forthrightly as it had done on the subject of beauty. Called the Pro-aging campaign, it had disappointing results.

Where did Dove go wrong? Was it really authenticity after all that captured women’s interest in the Real Beauty campaign? Maybe when it comes to aging the hallowed idea in marketing that people don’t like the idea of aging is valid. That being so, authenticity in ads directed to aging customers will be counterproductive.

But that’s the case. Older customers tend to be more demanding of authenticity in marketing communications. The issue is a matter of how an ad represents age. The Del Webb ad shown in this post proved to be highly successful. Its reference to age is oblique but respectful. And indirect.

    Many ads designed for older markets are patronizing, such as those ads that urge seniors to “collect the rewards you spent a lifetime earning.”

Ads that praise age can come across as exploitive. Some years ago Helena Rubenstein launched a campaign in which the tag line was “Beauty doesn’t end at 50.” It failed to produced the hoped for results. It projected a defensiveness about age that older women didn’t relate to.

The best way to connect a brand with older markets is to do so indirectly. This is not because the idea of aging is a turnoff for older people – remember from the last post the Duke University study that discovered higher levels of happiness among 70-year-olds than among 30-year-olds.

Older people know that in our society aging is widely regarded as an affliction. After all, how many products are promoted as “anti-aging” remedies? Older consumers tend to reject marketing that strongly and directly connects a brand and aging not because of how they feel about aging but because of how much of the rest of society feels about aging.

One supposed truism among marketers is that because boomers tend to see themselves as 10 or 15 years younger than they are chronologically it’s best to use appropriately younger models. Nonsense. First, in the more than three decades I have worked in older markets not just older consumers but consumers of all ages tend to lag behind their chronological age in how they feel. It works out that “cognitive age” tends to be about 70 to 85 percent of chronological age.

In any event, using younger models than the core target market is not authentic but is commonly done in marketing senior housing communities. The average age of new  move-ins in full service senior communities is generally in the very late 70s to early 80s. Yet, ads commonly feature models who are clearly in their 60s – or younger.

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

No harm done, you say? Well, as a matter of fact yes, the practice of using models that are much younger than residents in retirement communities can be costly in terms of wasted marketing dollars. Imagine the 70-year-old husband who with his 68-year-old wife visit a retirement community they have seen advertised with younger models. What is their likely reaction when seeing that most residents are well into their 80s? “Dear, I don’t think we’d like this place. There’re too many old people.”

The second ad in this post is a good example of an ad that only indirectly connects aging and a product for older people.  If the proof is in the pudding, the success of this ad showed that the intended audience really like how it tasted.

I think it says something not so great about our values that we struggle so mightily in our society to achieve authenticity. But to the degree that a marketer is able to successfully project authenticity marketing success will more likely be achieved.

 

 

 

 

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On Authenticity in Older markets

Back around 20 years ago there was a successful lifestyle magazine for the older crowd called 50 Plus. Readers Digest took notice of America’s aging population and the beachhead that 50 Plus had established in older markets and bought 50 Plus’s from its founding owners.

Certainly no slacker in magazine marketing, Reader’s Digest announced ambitious plans to run 50 Plus’s circulation up from about 550,000 to over a million in a couple of years.  To do this, Reader’s Digest felt it needed a new look and a new name. 50 Plus was rechristened New Choices and launched with page after page of sparklingly youthful looking seniors all sporting the fitness look of a triathelete.

Legions of long loyal 50 Plus subscribers were outraged. They were outraged by the name change, and outraged by the replacement of the real faces of aging with air brushed faces that masked the realities of aging. The iconic Reader’s Digest, one of the smartest magazine marketers in America, had struck out with an age group it should have better understood: seniors were a sizeable slice of Reader’s Digest circulation.

The New Choices team failed to realize the importance of authenticity in the ranks of older people. Apparently, aging was not a big issue to many on 50 Plus’s subscription roster.

Most advertising featuring pictures of seniors are no more authentic than New Choices was. And was is the right word because it shut down its operations in 2002, having never gotten close to its goal of over a million subscribers.

It’s widely known in marketing circles that most people over 50 think marketers misrepresent them in ads. Yet, few marketers seem influenced by this or know what to do about it. However, the remedy is simple: Be authentic in representing aging.

A recent issue of The Economist offered readers insights into how people feel about their own aging that would come as a surprise to most people in marketing. The core message of the article  is that generally speaking beyond middle age people get happier as they get older.

In one recent Duke University-based study when asked about their levels of happiness 70-year-olds reported greater happiness than 30-year-olds.

So why is it that marketers insist on showing older people acting like, looking like younger people?  Probably the biggest reason is that most advertising is created by younger people to whom aging seems like one of the worst experiences in life. In not having come to terms with their own aging it is natural for these marketing types to deny aging in their copywriting and ad artwork.

Being authentic doesn’t mean glorifying wrinkles or other signs of aging. Above all it simply means being natural. When they are not poorly executed jokes about aging, most depictions of seniors in ads are unnatural. Their contrived smiles in staged settings work against the very idea of authenticity, undercutting the ad’s credibility.

In the next post I’ll talk about how to be natural in marketing communications intended for seniors – and yes, I use the word “senior” with no concern. After all, I’ve been one for over 25 years. (Does that help my credibility in talking about marketing to the older crowd?)

 

 

 

 

 

Will Starbuck's Logo Change Turn Out to Be Brilliant Move?

Remember the widespread outrage over the change in the GAP logo a few months back? Changing logos is always a chancy action, the more so for brands that have a strong market presence. Imagine the revolution on Nike's hands if it decided to turn in its iconic swoosh for a "new and improved" geometric graphic stroke.

Last week Starbucks released a new version of its logo. While there were a few murmurs of protests here and there public response has been barely perceptable, either pro or con. Fast Company has an interesting theory on why Starbucks changed its logo and why that action may turn out to be nothing short of a brilliant decision that will accelerate the success of its recently announced plans for a major expansion throughout Asia.

The story highlights the often overlooked though obvious fact that people from different ethnic origins see the world differently -- not an inconsequential fact as the U.S.'s population growth continues to be almost soley from ethnic populations. Check the story out here.

 

Do We Need a New Spin on Getting Old?

Twenty-two years after people 40 and older became the adult majority marketers everywhere are finally paying rapt attention to aging markets. But there seems to be a dearth of consistency in how marketers view these markets.

A sizeable consensus does exist on one point: aging is a problem that can be solved by changing how people think about it. That’s how Colin Milner, CEO of the International Council of Active Aging, sees it.  He wants to “re-brand aging from burden to opportunity.” 

Others have come at the “problem” of aging in similar fashion, coining such terms as “creative aging,” “productive aging,” “vital aging,” and positive aging.” But putting a smiley face on aging has never seemed to me to be a very authentic way of viewing older markets. It masks the darker realities of aging which reinforces the deep-seated antipathy against aging that pervades our society.

As the name of this blog indicates, I have offered up the idea of “ageless marketing.” Instead of “active aging, how about “active living?” Or “creative living” in lieu of “creative aging.” Why do we feel compelled to promote advanced age as a great time of life by implicitly by invoking the values of youth?

Old age can be mercilessly hard to endure. Most people over 70 have five or more chronic conditions. Ceaseless pain in some part of the body is not uncommon. Many evolve into terminal conditions. The pharmaceutical industry certainly views old age as a time of proliferating health problems. This is apparent in their dominance of advertising on the nightly network news shows.

Of course, marketers never talk about “old age.” Old age people don’t exist on Madison Avenue. This pretend game rests on the myth that showing younger people using products that are consumed at a much higher per capita rate by older people will make the products more attractive to older people who after all have a few hundred billion to spend each year.

So, when marketers talk about the “over-50 market” they generally mean the 50 to 65 market – people who have fewer health constraints and who are jogging along with only a modest rate of decline in physical and cognitive abilities. After 65, older markets start getting complicated. Coping with the vicissitudes of later life becomes a more important focus for growing numbers than lifestyle modality. Why do we struggle so mightily to ignore that reality?

 Marketing writer Thom Forbes questions Milner’s verbal remedy for the “burden” of aging in a recent column, “Do We Need A New Spin On Getting Old.”  He acknowledges the power of words in shaping our attitudes on aging, for good or ill, but goes on to say, “… there's nothing quite as convincing as creaky joints, winded lungs and easily fatigued muscles to convince us that we are, indeed, getting old.”

Like Forbes, my issue is not that positive projections of older people have little effect in producing bountiful marketing, but that they are overly done at the expense of representing old age in a more realistic light. This sets up a problem involving authenticity.

Various surveys have shown that most older people feel that marketers don’t represent them accurately in ads. We’re told that authenticity is more important in older markets, yet we represent older people in inauthentic ways. What is the solution for this dilemma? How can we create attractive messages that are authentic in how they represent old age?  Are reality and attractiveness of commercial messaging incompatible?

Stay tuned.

 

The End of the Advertising Business

The list of industries radically transformed and even destroyed by disruptive technology continues to grow. Remember the newspaper business before Craigslist stemmed the flow of classified advertising revenues. And think about the billions that Skype has drained out of the telephone business. Then Apple’s iPod came along to destroy the retail music industry as we had known it for decades.

Now, another industry appears to be teetering on the edge of going the way of the dinosaur.

A feature story in the current issue of Fast Company begins:

Advertising is on the cusp of its first creative revolution since the 1960s. But the ad industry might get left behind.

Is advertising on the cusp of a creative revolutio0on or is the business in any recognizable form simply headed for extinction? Indeed, digital technologies seem already to be having an effect on traditional business models in advertising equivalent to that of the meteor 65 million years ago whose impact wiped out  dinosaurs.

An extreme view? Just remember the newspaper, telephone and retail music industry as they were not much more than a decade ago. What are your thoughts?

Why Isn't Building Shareholder Wealth a Valid Corporate Purpose?

You better watch out,
You better not cry,
Better not pout,
I'm telling you why:
Santa Claus is coming to town.
He's making a list,
And checking it twice;
Gonna find out
Who's naughty and nice.
Santa Claus is coming to town.

It’s that time of year, when at least when I was a kid you best minded your p’s and q’s lest the red-capped visitor soon to arrive from the North Pole leave you a lump of coal instead of a shiny new toy.

A lot of business writers are going about warning companies to mind their social responsibilities if they want to avoid being paid in lumps of coal. As co-author of Firms of Endearment, a recent bestseller dealing with the issue of corporate morality, I want to tell you why much of what people who promote the doctrine of corporate social responsibility is misdirected.

Let’s start with the first two sentences of Firms of Endearment:

This book is not about corporate social responsibility. It is about sound management.

We started the book with those two sentences because we believed that a moral platform is generally not a strong strategic platform for building and growing a company.  

Nobel economist Milton Friedman said – infamously so in many people’s minds – that the only social responsibility of a business is building shareholder wealth. While I have criticized Friedman for too narrow a view of corporate social responsibility, at its core his declaration of a company’s social purpose is sound.

The term “purpose” has become a big IN word in discussions about what companies should do for society. It appears explicitly in numerous book titles and a steady stream of articles about what companies need to do to justify their existences. The subtext is that companies with a purpose are superior from a social perspective to companies that only work to create profits for their owners.

My question is, “Why is building shareholder wealth not a valid purpose?” Whether it is done nobly or not is another issue.

The central theme of Firms of Endearment is about achieving business success (call it shareholder wealth building, if you like) by aligning company needs with those of five core stakeholder groups. Notice that I use the term “aligning”, not “balance.”

Times are when investors’ interests take precedence and other times when employees’ or customers’ needs come first.  The issue is not who ranks first among stakeholders but does a company operate in a fashion in which no stakeholder gains at the uncompensated expense of other stakeholders.

Firms of Endearment was the first book written for general business audiences about formally making the needs of multiple stakeholder groups a strategic platform for business development and operations. It is a book about sound management, not about what various people might regard as a company’s moral obligations to society.

Companies that base their operations on a multiple stakeholder business model are liberally found throughout “Best Companies to Work for” lists. They enjoy uncommonly low customer turnover and are widely applauded for the positive contributions they make to the communities in which they operate. But none of that means that these companies are driven by abstract moral objectives. Survivability and profitability are their first order of business, as well it should be on behalf of a company’s investors.  

But what best serves investors is often wrapped up with what best serves all core stakeholders.

 Companies that subscribe to the multiple stakeholder business model tend to experience lower employee turnover, higher productivity, deeper customer loyalty, better relationships with suppliers, stronger community support and lower marketing costs. All that being the case, why wouldn’t a company want to make the multiple stakeholder business model the strategic foundation of its operations?

The answer to that question must be reserved for another post, for it is indeed puzzling why such a sure-fire way of building a company is not more broadly followed. However, I was motivated to write this post after reading yet one more article about how company operations should be rooted in “purpose” with the implication that making a profit for shareholders is not a worthy “purpose.”

That theme has grown tiresome for me.

Besides, what one person may consider a worthy purpose might well be considered by another person as an unworthy purpose.

So, it’s time to begin stop thinking about corporate social responsibility as a moral imperative. Instead, as companies like Costco, Starbucks, Whole Foods, Patagonia and others we researched for Firms of Endearment have found, thinking outside the traditional the investor box can be a great way to build shareholder wealth. And to serve the interests of members of all core stakeholder groups.

The bottom line here is that management best serves shareholders when its actions are aligned with the interests of all stakeholders. There is no need to think about corproate social responsibilty as a separate matter. It's about what makes for sound management that best serves owners' interests. The multiple stakeholder business model does just that.

Neuromarketing and Politics

Fast Company posted an article on its website today that might be of interest to readers who found something of interest in my last post in which I discussed the new, burgeoning field of neuromarketing. The article examines six TV commercials for candidates of both poitical parties and rates them on a 1000-point scale for probable effectiveness. Regartdless of how you feel about the outcome of Tuesday's elections you may find the article engaging.

The Left Brain's Antagonism to New Information Challenging its Existing Models of Reality

Reader Pat Jennings wrote, “Are you familiar with the book "Neuromarketing" by Renvoise and Morin? It is a great book for learning how to market to the "old brain." I decided to check the book out and, as I often do, got distracted and ended up reading an article in The New Scientist about the recent debacle over Gap’s experience in crowd sourced logo design.

In case you missed the story, Gap recently got burned when it abandoned its traditional logo in favor of one produced by crowd sourcing. Public response to the new logo reminded me of the New Coke fiasco in 1985 when the Coca-Cola Company brought the iconic drink out in a new formula.

The New Scientist article reported research by the neuromarketing firm NeuroFocus explaining the broad rejection by consumers of the new logo. Without weighing on the merits of the research, I was struck by the number of comments posted by readers of the article that dismissively charged NeuroFocus with practicing “pseudo science.”  

In a new book I’m writing I describe how the left hemisphere of the brain – the primary site of reasoning – is biased against new information that does not conform to its existing models of reality. It is inclined to either reconform the information to fit with what it currently holds to be true or reflexively reject it out of hand. This rejection is often sarcastically disdained as when a person writes off an empirically derived conclusion with the charge, “It’s pseudoscience.”

Over the past several months we’ve been reminded numerous times that this is the 50^th anniversary of the start of Jane Goodall’s epochal research into the world of chimpanzees. When she discovered that chimps made and used tools the left brains of scientists the world over roundly rejected her claim. Goodall’s lack of a university education didn’t help her standing. Yet she had challenged the most fundamental difference claimed by science to separate man and lower animals. Today, of course, tool makers and users are known to exist throughout the animal kingdom.

We are passing through times of unprecedented speed and scale of change that are upending our view of the world across the full spectrum of reality. Once again I'm reminded of the words of the character Valentine in Tom Stoppard's play, Arcadia when reflecting on this fact:

The future is disorder. A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.

Advances in neuroscience over the three decades that I’ve been an avid reader in the subject are astonishing. As I’ve written before, the shift in our views of the human brain and mind is no less epochal than the shift centuries ago from a flat earth to a round earth perspective. Much of what we have believed about how the human mind works has turned out to be as much an illusion as the earth’s flatness is.

Research into the human brain is taking marketing into new dimensions of human behavior that are far beyond the reach of traditional consumer research methods. One of the most intriguing dimensions is the aging brain – a matter of considerable concern to marketers since changes associated with aging begin around the late 30s and early 40s. These changes significantly compromise many traditional ideas in marketing.

In his book The Mature Mind psychiatrist and geriatrician Gene Cohen does a splendid job describing in accessible language changes in brain functioning that take place as we age. He uses few five-dollar terms from brain science to get his points across. Importantly, especially for those of us who have left the early years of midlife far behind, Cohen documents how the aging brain is in some important ways a better brain.

In Serving the Ageless Market (McGraw-Hill, 1990), I proposed that some changes in mental functioning associated with age were improperly regarded as sources of handicaps that older people had to find ways of coping with. Some of these changes were developmental changes that took older minds to higher levels of mental functioning. In The Mature Mind, Dr. Cohen provides new information that supports that idea. In fact, he coined the expression developmental intelligence to stand for that idea.

As the aging population continues explosive growth while virtually no growth is taking place in the under-50 population, marketers and their clients will be best served by challenging the left brain’s antagonism toward new information that challenges existing models of reality.

 

Worst Ads of 2010?

FastCompany writer gives his opinion of the worst ads of 2010. Who agrees with him? See follow-up comments after his article.

The Brain Thinks Brands Are People

"Brands aren't people, consumers know that, they get you're out to make a buck.” So says  marketeer Clinton Duncan from Down Under. Hmmm. Nothing new about that idea. Yes, perhaps, but it’s not quite right.

Ironically, Duncan’s agency recently created a campaign for a new Scandinavian furniture wholesaler operation in Australia that very much cast the new brand in anthropomorphic terms.  You might want to call the campaign’s success dumb luck given Duncan’s apparent defective understanding of how people mentally process brands. (You can read about it at Fast Company.)

From a left brain perspective, Duncan is right. People know that brands’ aren’t people. However, the left brain is not the only side of the brain that weighs in on decisions customers make.

All information picked up by the senses is processed in the right brain before the left brain – the analytical, reasoning language speaking left brain gets much of a crack at it. But unlike the left brain, the emotional right brain perceives reality in sensual terms. Only the left brain with its highly developed language abilities can reduce reality to abstract terms.

But something else about the right brain must be understood to know why Duncan’s view that people know that brands aren’t people is a flawed and oversimplified  version of reality. The right brain cannot process any information that is not rendered in the context of living things (conceptually or actually). If something cannot be connected to life in some way the right brain ignores it. Not so with the left brain. It has the power to see anything in any form it chooses because it organizes abstract representations of  reality. It can create its own reality in any form it is inclined to. Not so the right brain.

The right brain sticks to reality as configured by the senses. It cannot remake reality. And, as already said, the right bran’s reality is rooted in connections with life.

A brand must not simply connect with life to be a strong brand, it must be perceived as the equivalent of a life form to the deeper processing centers of the brain. The goofy looking Michelin Man is a life form to the right brain -- something more than just a cartoon character.

I am not talking theory here. The right brain's cognitive connection to life is is validated by recent brain research. All this boils down to the fact that if you fail to cognitively connect your brand with the right brain on its nonverbal terms, the brand has no chance of getting off the ground.  If speaking the sensory language of the right brain puzzles you, then need to find someone how to talk to the right brain. Truly, you are not going to get your message very deeply into the mills of reasoning in the left brain without employing the wordless language of the right brain. Without doing this any successes you have will likely be more a matter of dumb luck.

 

 

 

 

The Relentless Myth of the Rational Customer

We’ve had it so wrong in marketing for so long that like the proverbial frog in a tub of hot water with rising temperatures we haven’t noted incremental changes as we’ve actually become even more wrong in how we think about customers and marketing.

One of the most damaging realms of marketing mythology revolves around the idea that while  everyone promotes giving messages an emotional twist the truth is that not many marketers understand this dynamic. Sorry to be so damning, but if one examines the rate of campaign failures we can obtain no other conclusion.

In the first place because of our own cultural conditioning we don’t really believe that emotions are the foundation of our decisions. We harbor the illusion that because we are rational beings we analyze our options and make decisions based on what our analysis reveals in our best interests. So we structure our marketing messages under the same assumption.

The only thing wrong with this scenario is that it’s pretty much wrong and new findings in neuropsychology are showing why.

But it’s not necessary to shove consumers through $3 million CAT scans to learn how wrong we have been and what we should be doing instead. All the greats in the golden days of advertising, e.g., Ogilvy, Bernbach, Barnett, et al) intuitively knew the right way to communicate with customer. 

A friend just emailed me a TED talk on the topic that I heartily recommend. Marketer Simon Sinek just uses a flip chart – yes, no PowerPoint – and some common sense to illuminate what he claims is the biggest flaw in conventional marketing. He is worth listening to. But don’t just listen to the Sinek: study what his words mean. This experience could (honestly) change the way you see customers, approach marketing – and view yourself.

 

An Interesting Read: In Praise of Dissent

Catch this article in Ode, a fascinating magazine devoted to "intelligent optimists." The article has nothing to do with the central theme of this blog, but everything to do with life. If you have ever read About under my signature picture with a mule named Dusty, you have a clue as to why this article appealed to me. I dedicate this posting to all of you out there who have what it takes to avoid groupthink. As we move into this next decade you may find the tests of your will against those immobilized by the status quo increasing. As I indicated several posts ago we are in for changes taking place at warp speed in directions beyond most people's imaginations a decade or so ago. So -- damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.

Why Do Relatively Few Women Make a Big Name in Business?

Quick: Name the five most famous books written by women on the subject of management. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.  Bzzzzz. You lost out. Sorry.

Let’s try an easier question. Aside from Marrisa Mayer, Ursula Burns, and Carol Bartz (to take out the easy ones) name five leading women in tech.  Tick. Tick. Tick. Oh, forget it.

Where are all the women in this age of gender diversity in the workplace, especially in tech?

Women supposedly account for more new businesses than men do. According to the Kaufman Foundation which studies such matters, between 1997 and 2002 U.S. women-owned firms grew in number by 19.8 percent, compared with a 10.3 percent growth rate firms overall.

During the same period, however, women-owned firms recorded lower survival numbers, as well as lower numbers for size, growth, earnings and profits. The data suggest that women-owned firms are smaller and less growth-oriented than men-owned firms.

What’s behind these disappointing numbers?

First, let me answer why I’m writing about gender and the workplace. I started looking at the topic in connection with a new book I’m doing. It’s hard to find women’s names that resonate in the business community like those of Peter Drucker, Gary Hamel, Tom Peters, Michael, Porter, Jim Collins, John Kotter, and Warren Bennis and so on and so on.

Then, a Fast Company article appeared in my email today on “The Most Influential Women in Technology.” The number of influential women in tech is shockingly small. Women as a founder or co-founder account for less than 10 percent of all tech startups.

I’ve read that women have greater challenges getting credit, that they still must learn to play by rules laid down by men, that they have to face social stigmas associated with women who abandon family  for career, and other reasons why fewer women make it really big in the business world.

Alicia Robb, Kauffman Foundation senior research fellow said, "The interesting thing about women entrepreneurs is that many of them may be purposely starting businesses as a lifestyle choice. The number of women-owned businesses growing faster may reflect that women are going into business as a viable way to move out of the traditional employment market and gain flexibility. It's hard to know if those kinds of businesses are where they want to be or if they would like to grow faster."

In other words it is not fair to women (or men, for that matter) to compare them on equal terms. Women often start businesses for different reasons than men do. And probably by virtue of lower testosterone levels they generally pursue business less competitively.

Do we see women who are as competitive as any man? Of course – but not as often because women are indeed different. Their brains work differently and they have characteristic values that weigh in heavier in their decisions than they do in men’s decisions. For example, research shows that women tend to be more collaboratively-minded than men are. Men are more likely to make a go of it on their own.

One thing I’m seeing is that while women’s influence in tech may be what some would call appallingly low, women’s influence on the business ethos in general is growing and men’s is ebbing. Perhaps from the standpoint of what’s good for society, maybe women’s influence on corporate behavior is more important than on corporate growth. I’ll get into more detail in my next post on this topic because it affects every aspect of business from employee relations and product design to marketing and customer servicing.