Casting a fresh eye over the older market Sunday, February 07, 2010 The over-50s are bigger television watchers than any other age group, and among the most affluent consumers around, but you wouldn’t know it from TV commercial breaks.
Whether the product being advertised is a mobile phone, a detergent or a high end car (most of which are bought by older people), 90 per cent of images have one common denominator - youth. It’s generally more than evident that there are two core audience groups that most brands want to woo and these are 18 to 34year-olds or ‘‘housekeepers with children’’.
On March 3, Dublin plays host to a conference called the Business of Ageing - Turning Silver into Gold, which aims to alert Irish businesses and investment houses to ‘‘the opportunities and challenges of the rapidly growing and changing global market of the older consumer’’.
Those who attend will be made aware of facts such as these:
* It’s expected that most children born today in the developed world will live to be 100. Longevity is increasing at a rate of two years per decade or five hours per day.
* The world’s 60-plus population will double in size over the next decades from 11 per cent today to 22 per cent by 2050. In 2045,there will be more people over 60 than there are under five.
According to the Centre for Ageing Research and Development in Ireland (CARDI), a recent report stated that there were a million people aged 60 and above now living on the island of Ireland (rising to 29 per cent of the total population in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland by 2041).
The greatest growth in the future, CARDI said, would be in the number of people aged 85-plus. This cohort will rise almost fivefold, from 74,000 to 356,000 by 2041.
* Older people are wealthier than anyone else .The 50-plus age group have 80 per cent of the wealth in countries like Britain and the US. In Ireland, those aged 65 and over have a declared income of €6.6 billion.
* Just 10 per cent of marketing is aimed at people aged over 50, and much of that is either irrelevant or insulting to them.
Conference organiser Anne Connolly said the sheer size of the seniors market was difficult to convey.
‘‘This is a huge cohort and its tastes are changing as the baby boomers hit this age. They are more demanding, more discerning, more ready to spend on goods and services.
‘‘The implications for companies are huge. In the future, we’ve seen research predicting major demand for things such as self-parking cars, for far more automation in cars generally, more disease-targeting from food companies. People won’t want to eat foodstuffs that are bad for them.”
Leo Moore, head of planning at advertising agency McCann Erickson, agrees.
Bono, he points out, is about to turn 50. Robert Redford is in his 70s. These people are not ‘‘old’’ by any traditional measure.
‘‘I don’t think brands invest in or understand this audience nearly as much as they do other audiences. There are far more stereotypes about this age group in advertising than there are for any other. It’s just not particularly insightful,” he said. Moore noted that the over 50s have benefited financially from an era when jobs were held for life, pension allocations were generous and house prices rose.
‘‘The traditional image of the grey market as being very sedentary, more or less finished with life, has very much changed,” he added. ‘‘The over-50s are travelling, they have very active social lives and are very strong technology users.”
Ed Murphy, who runs the franchise business Home Instead, has experience of dealing with two kinds of ‘senior’, the 50-somethings and the over-80s.
His business provides care services for people who might otherwise be in nursing homes, or who might in the past have been minded by their grown up children, generally supplementing the increasingly stretched home help services provided by the state.
Founded in 2005, it now has 17 offices and is opening three more this year, having won the National Small Business of the Year Award in 2007 and the Franchise of the Year Award in 2008,and having been a finalist in the Entrepreneur of the Year Award 2009.
‘‘We find that it’s not the very old people themselves who decide on this kind of service, it’s usually the daughter of around 50, who makes the call,” he said. ‘‘This service is for people whose family may be in Dublin or in London and who may not be in a position to look after the parent themselves.”
‘‘We’re keeping up with demand, but only because we are opening new offices and recruiting more people,” he said.
‘‘The fact is that the state may have 55,000 people to look after now but, with the way the population is going, it will soon rise to 70,000, and that means carers will have less time for everyone. This is where we can come in. A lot of people are becoming more discerning about this sort of care.”
Dick Stroud, a British specialist in marketing to the over 50s and the author of The 50Plus Market, Europe’s best selling book about marketing to older consumers, ascribes the marketing sector’s apparent lack of interest in this wealthy group to sheer inertia.
‘‘I think there’s always something more urgent that they need to be doing,” he said.
‘‘And older people do buy lots of products and services whether they are being targeted or not.
‘‘So in a lot of cases they’re getting the business anyway.
The question is, are they getting more of the business than the next brand?”
Stroud said there were clear segments to be dissected within the seniors group. A distinction needed to be drawn between the merely older consumer - who may be very able bodied and sociable - and the ‘‘very old old’’, of whom there will be a lot more as time goes by, he said, and to whom particular products are of great relevance.
He also said it was a mistake to assume that, because you are targeting the over-70s, for instance, use of digital media was inappropriate. (Facebook advertising data found that 13,560 Irish people over 64 were using the social media site last year, which is 2.7 per cent of the population. This is major growth: in 2008, only 2,500 were on Facebook.)
‘‘Only a small percentage of the over-70s may be online, but chances are they are spending more time online than any other group. Also, the more bright and affluent they are, the more likely they are to be digitally savvy. So that’s an attractive target market right there.”
Asked who was getting their message to older consumers right, Stroud cited companies such as Marks & Spencer, whose choice of older models such as Twiggy for advertising campaigns helped it to attain a broad appeal across all ages. He also referred to the drinks brand Innocent, which makes no mention of age in any of its marketing strategies.
‘‘The challenge for many companies is not so much the need to target the over-50s, but the need to be as age-neutral as possible in the way they present themselves, he said.
Companies had yet to get to grips with the reality that, with many young people unemployed, and a wealth transfer under way, parents and grandparents will increasingly be the ones making decisions, not just about their own purchases, but about those of their young relatives.
So the need to address older people did not just apply to makers of stairlifts and the like, he said.
Those who work in this area say there are many myths about the seniors market that have little basis in reality. One is that older people are not entrepreneurial - whereas evidence suggests some are very much so.
Another is that they stick to the brands they know. Stroud said he had conducted global research with media buyer OMD that found brand loyalty did not always increase with age, as is often widely assumed, but in some cases could decrease, as is the case in Australia.
Stroud said he was well aware that it might take a few more years for most of these truths to gain traction in the marketing profession.
‘‘It’s a fairly radical change for any company to start to target over-50s’ business . . . it’s a very slow burn, a bit like climate change.”
* For more information, see www.businessofageing.com
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