Somebody asked me to summarise the marketing landscape – in relation to how it deals with aging. All comments welcome.
The marketing industry is like the driver of a sleek sports car who has been merrily driving along a motorway but now finds the road surface is getting bumpy; the signposts have disappeared, it’s getting dark and the car’s steering is failing. Convinced the road is correct they drive on, ignoring all evidence to the contrary. Instead of stopping and reading the map they keep driving. For reassurance they play the same, familiar music, louder and louder. They are hopelessly lost.
The old map of consumer marketing was exquisitely simple. It had a single road, leading to the cherished 18-35 year olds. Now the landscape has changed, dissolving into a myriad of side turning and lanes. New signposts appear with names like “the over-50s”. Some of these go nowhere but some lead to six-lane highways. Marketing needs a new map – maybe a new car.
The Western and much of the Eastern world is institutionally ageist. Youth, youthfulness, vitality and modernity always trumps age, maturity, wisdom, and experience. It is not surprising that living in a culture where young is good and old is boring, marketers behave as they do. This is not a value judgement; it’s a fact of life.
Another fact of life is the relentless shift in the economic centre of gravity towards older people. Each day there are more, better-off oldies and less, indebted youngsters. Our culture faces ‘young’, the economic reality is pointed ‘old’.
These opposing forces are creating strains and conflict. Attempting to make sense of this dilemma sits the archetypical 30 something marketer. Every so often they hear the media screaming “the future is grey” and blaming them for their insipient age-phobia. All of the time, fellow marketers whisper to them not to worry, it doesn’t really matter and anyway we all know that “the future of a brand is young”. Senior managers, look down from their offices on the top floor, seemingly unconcerned about the commotion.
Dick Stroud www.20plus30.com