Marketing
to Seniors and Other Observations (Partie 1/2)
Cibler
les Seniors dans le domaine de l’hôtellerie
I’ve refined my
thoughts on marketing to seniors, learned new things about interactive
marketing, and given more thought to employee training and retention.
This month’s column will touch on these subjects. At a recent convention
there was an excellent session on marketing to seniors which brought out
some things I had not thought about before. The first thing I learned
was the concept of « cohort traits or likes ».
Marketing to Cohorts
Cohorts as you may
know are groups or associates. Cohort traits include, among other things,
a preference for a type of music. For example, I know many seniors like
big band music from the thirties and forties. The Baby Boomers won’t suddenly
start liking that music when they become seniors, they’ll prefer rock
and roll or what ever they enjoyed during their formative years, Bottom
line, many items which appeal to today’s seniors won’t appeal to seniors
a decade from now. That’s not to say they won’t need some of the same
features. Big alpha numeric characters to compensate for poor eyesight
could probably be marketed just that way to today’s seniors, but in a
few years, the same feature may have to be marketed as convenient or modern!
Self Perception is Reality How people perceive themselves is also very
different. I asked the speaker what age the people in photographs used
in promotional pieces, such as brochures, should be if my target audience
was 60 to 75 years old. The reply was about 15 years less as that is how
people perceive themselves. How true, I’m almost 49 and certainly don’t
picture myself as being that old. I imagine when one is packaging features
some items which cross the boundaries of age should be included. We’ve
been promoting the availability of complimentary bicycles at one of our
hotels. Until I attended this workshop it had not occurred to me what
a broad appeal that feature had. We need to look for more like that.
Une
Un
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Male/Female Ratio
One must also consider
the disproportionate number of women as a ratio to men in the current
batch of seniors. The fact is that at the oldest ages the ratio is approximately
four to one. That may be useful in targeting one’s marketing efforts to
be more efficient. The number of true seniors had actually been failing
off recently because of the lower birth rates during the depression and
World War 11. Starting next year, however, the full impact of the post
World War 11 baby boom will begin to be felt as those people born in 1946
begin to reach 50. Supposedly someone will turn 50 every 8 seconds beginning
next year. Think about how different a 45 to 50 year old is in their interest
and activity level than a person that age when I was a child. Almost everyone
that age was a grandparent and acted like you and I might picture grandparents
acting. No in-line skating, no aerobics classes or SCUBA diving! We all
know many people of that age today who, whether they are a grandparent
or not, undertake those activities! The scariest thing was that the presenter
was a woman who appeared to be in her mid-thirties. She was in her mid-forties
and had children five and eight years old. This isn’t my grandmother’s
generation, it is mine!
Marketing to Boomers
How do we market to
ourselves? For the next twenty years the boomer bubble will be going through
their biggest spending years. As the session on seniors brought out, the
people we consider seniors are children of the depression with all the
baggage relating to financial security that goes with that. The following
generations are all more prone to using credit or otherwise spending to
the limit. So not only are the numbers of people huge, but so is their
willingness to spend. We really do need to get ready to market to our
own generation and we need to do it efficiently. How many of these people
are surfing the Internet? How many of these people will respond to interactive
marketing?
Kirby D. Payne, CHA, is president of The American Hospitality Management
Company which provides consulting and management assistance to hotels
in the U.S.
