Branding for Baby Boomers

From: Baby Boomers? Big Deal.

There’s an unmistakable youth bias in brand communications, and it’s not a new problem. It deals with the unabashed over-representation of younger-looking (and acting) people in the marketing messages that we see and hear each day. Curmudgeons have been complaining about this for decades.

Once upon a time, it made good sense to be biased towards youth, but this blind obsession for using young, alluring twenty-somethings flies in the face of the plain facts of today’s marketplace. Why have brand marketers overlooked the “older” age group as “not important.” The main reason? They WEREN’T important. Think about it.

Back in the 1970s for example, “older” meant someone as young as 50. These were the people who lived through the depression, World War II and Korea. They had a completely different outlook on thrift, consumption, saving and quality of life. While their numbers were large, they just didn’t act in a way that made them attractive to marketers. In fact, they looked, and acted, OLD.

As a result, they weren’t considered “vital” so marketers wrote them off. The sweet spot was youth, and plenty big enough to feed brand growth. The truth is that now there’s a huge, untapped potential market for upmarket brands out there, and it’s called the Baby Boomer generation.