A big mistake that a number of marketers have made in reference to the baby boomer generation is that they are stuck in their ways and don't like to change. In reality, it is found that this isn't necessarily true at all.
With the 79 million plus baby boomers in America, along with the huge amount of spending power they represent, it's not the wisest thing to not understand what makes them tick or how to market to them.
The first thing to realize is what I already mentioned, and that is that many boomers aren't tied to brands that they've used, and are willing to switch if there's a reason to. They don't follow the patterns of the generation before them that stayed with some things over the duration of their life time.
Marketing to them should include them seeing themselves doing fun and edgy things, stuff that says they're not too old to do it, as they in reality think.
An example of a survey of women between the ages of 50 to 64 by Dove revealed that almost 80 percent didn't consider themselves as older women. So the marketing to them must correspond with that way of thinking.
Dove's marketing director, Kathy O'Brien said, "These women believe they are too young to be called old. We wanted to show that beauty has no age limit. We wanted to show true honest beauty, including gray hair and wrinkles."
People in this age bracket like to be marketed to with a little bit of rebellion as well, representing a lot of the way their childhoom was lived in the late 50s and early 60s. They like to be thought of as being in that same frame of mind, and evidently they are. We just have to test things out so that we don't go too far there.
The thing is that what many may consider old today, isn't, in the minds of the baby boomers. To market to them means that that is one of the key elements that needs to be included in our campaigns.
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