We said we've been busy. This spring both Matt Thornhill and John Martin have been teaching and educating a wide range of organizations about marketing to today's Boomer Consumer. Here is just a partial listing:

 

v      Million Dollar Round Table "Boomertirement" Conference in NYC (insurance industry event)

v      LIMRA/LOMA Retirement Conference, Atlanta (insurance)

v      Credit Union Executive Society Marketing Conference, Dallas

v      Financial Freedom annual meeting, Orlando

v      National Tour Association Spring Meet, Kelowna, British Columbia

v      Virginia Beach Convention & Visitors Bureau Tourism Summit

v      Southern Newspaper Publishers Association conference, Richmond

v      Canadian Newspaper Association annual meeting, Winnipeg

v      Florida "Retail Masters" conference, Naples

v      Washington State Health Care Association conference, Vancouver, WA

 

Two interesting assignments were for companies traditionally not focused on older consumers: John Martin was a featured presenter in front of 300 brand managers at a Johnson & Johnson Consumer Healthcare summit (Band Aid, Tylenol, Listerine, etc.).

Matt Thornhill conducted a seminar on marketing to Boomer Grandparents at the Feld Entertainment annual meeting (producers of Ringling Brothers & Barnum & Bailey Circus, Disney on Ice and Disney Live events).

 

Lastly, SIR Research, the partner marketing research firm of the Boomer Project, landed the assignment to conduct a state-wide "State of Aging" study for the Virginia Department on Aging. This study is the first time in ten years the state has collected consumer input on this topic and the study could serve as a model for other states preparing for the "age wave" of older Boomers.

 

See, we've been busy.

Last week's Advertising Age magazine featured a story about Unilever Corporation's "boomer project" (love the name) to enlighten their organization about the economic value of today's older Boomer.

 

The article (requires a subscription -- but you can get a synopsis of it here) marks the first time we've seen the advertising industry recognize that older Boomers are worthy of their attention for consumer products other than pharmaceuticals, adult diapers or dentures.

 

Over the last few years people have asked us when will the advertising agencies stop making ads targeting young consumers and actually try to create ads targeting Boomers. Our answer was that agencies will only wake up to Boomers after clients do. The Unilever article was the most emailed article last week on AdAge.com, so we feel confident in predicting that ad agencies are now paying attention.

We find it encouraging that Johnson & Johnson made Boomers a focus during their day-long "consumer day." It has taken about three years, but it seems consumer product companies are finally figuring out that there is a consumer group out there with money to spend that happens to be older than 18-34.

 

Halleluiah.

 

Seems every time we log on these days, there is another Boomer-focused Web site, vying for the attention of the 80% of Boomers regularly online.

 

The newer ones include the well-financed BoomerTowne (we're not big fans of the extra "e" - it's kind of oxymoronic on "ye olde Internet"), and the strangely named BOOMJ (because the Boomer generation also contains members of "Generation Jones," or in other words, they couldn't get a better URL to use so they made one up).

 

The sense we get on BoomerTowne is that they are trying to sell us something, but we aren't sure what that is, yet. BOOMJ is more of a ghost town than an online community.

 

We get especially annoyed when we click on BoomerTowne's About Us section and they reveal nothing about the people behind the site, they just describe the site itself. And yes, information is just as elusive over in the About Us section at BOOMJ, where all they tell us is the origin of the weird name.

This is a pet peeve of ours because it suggests that either they have no business being in this business (hence, not telling us about their writers, editors, content masters, management and so forth), or they have something to hide (owned by an evil dictator in a foreign land).

 

Neither case turns out to be true, but can someone explain to us why they won't provide any real information in the "About Us" section? 

From a marketing standpoint, we're not sure what the right model is for a Boomer-focused site. As we've said before, we think focus is key - not to be all things to all visitors, but to start with a particular focus and expand over time.

 

Being a "Boomer" is not yet a real affinity group, it's a demographic label.

 

We'll keep watching these start-ups and see what happens.

Maybe these new Boomer-oriented sites should read this entry:

An interactive firm in the Washington, DC region, Immersion Active, has built a new demo site to help educate Web site operators about how to design for older consumers. Called Carol's Web, the demo contains practical, accurate and helpful tips and techniques.

 

We recommend it to anyone operating a Web site targeting older consumers.

We are always collecting and cataloging the best secondary research out there on today's Boomer.

Here are four recent finds we recommend you download and read, with one caveat -- each of these reports were "sponsored" by an organization with an agenda of some sort.

 

Unilever's "Boomer Shoppers Today and Tomorrow - Following the Money" (links to a press release about the study, the link to the PDF is at the bottom of the page).

This report presents an interesting behavior-based segmentation scheme on how Boomers shop retail today, and how they might do it over the next ten years. 

American Hospital Association - "When I'm 64: How Boomers Will Change Health Care"  (this links directly to the 3.2 MB PDF file). 

We found this 24-page report eye-opening and filled with implications and recommendations for everyone in the healthcare industry. Typical factoid that will shock you: By 2030, more than 1 in 3 Boomers will be considered obese (21 million).

 

Pew Charitable Trust's "Economic Mobility - Is the American Dream Alive and Well?" (links to Web site about the project).

This report focuses mainly on intergenerational economic mobility - the extent to which children move up or down the income spectrum relative to their parents' generation. This analysis is perhaps most in keeping with the spirit of the American Dream, in which each generation is meant to do better than the one that came before.

The findings: today's younger generations are not as prosperous as the Boomer and other preceding generations. They're losing ground.

 

MetLife's "It's Not Your Mother's Retirement - A MetLife Study of Women and Generational Differences" (links to "What's New" page on MetLife, which then links to a PDF file).

Here is a quantitative assessment of attitudes towards retirement years by today's young adult women compared to the opinions of older women.

 

The "death care" industry is gearing up for how Boomers will transform funerals, obituaries and the like. We've seen articles about DVD biographies being produced and shown at funerals. But we recently came across something that you will either think is wonderful and beautiful, or freaky and weird.

 

Seems some scientists and gemologists have figured out how to extract a carbon molecule from someone's hair, alive or dead, and to replicate it and heat it until they create a man-made, or in this case, grandma-made, diamond.

 

The company is LifeGem and for upwards of $5,000 and more you can memorialize Grandma, or your late poodle FiFi, in a synthetic diamond made from their carbon molecules. Their tag line: "Because love lives on."

 

A diamond is forever, right? Now you can be too.

So what do you think - cool idea or does it make you squeamish?

 

 

 

In this month's paid newsletter from the editors at the Boomer Project, Boomer MarketingNews, we feature stories on: