Photo Credit: Dan Burn-Forti

I do not envy the jobs of advertising executives and creative minds. In this digital era, consumers try to skip ads and tune out commercials. That’s why Amazon’s Kindle and Netflix have become so popular – there are no ads when you peruse your newspapers on an e-reader and streamed movies are commercial-free.

Before I retired from the public relations industry, I’ve always said that advertising is not as effective as public relations because the latter specializes in telling stories, not hard-selling a brand, products or services. It looks like the advertising industry has finally caught on – most ads and commercials nowadays, particularly online, are focusing on story-telling or sharing experiences. Nevertheless, it’s still hard to find one that appeals to baby boomers.

There are, however, three ad campaigns that are an exception: Questrade, HSBC and PepsiCo.

Prior to the series of prime-time TV commercials on asking your financial advisors tough questions, nobody has probably ever heard of Toronto-based online brokerage Questrade. Its current marketing campaign includes two TV spots with an investor asking their portfolio manager a difficult question about fees and the negative effect on their retirement savings. This immediately became a “grabber” for a lot of boomers who could immediately relate to the manager’s dismissive answer. The tagline “It’s time to ask tough questions about your money” just sinks in deeply for boomers and soon-to-be retirees. Print and out-of-home executions similarly feature some of the difficult questions Questrade wants customers to ask their current financial advisor, and include the hashtag: #Ask Tough Questions.

See Questrade TV commercial below:

According to the company’s COO Stephen Graham, the campaign is meant to connect with consumers who know less about the brand and push Questrade’s robo-advisor platform.

Marketing Magazine reported that while the pointed questions seem to take direct aim at the big firms with huge fees, Graham said the intent was not to directly target the competition but portray the real questions and concerns that were unearthed during research. He was spot on about the campaign being a real conversation and the honesty, behind asking the uncomfortable questions, resonates well with consumers.

The second example of strong advertising is the global jet-bridge “The Story of Human Ambition” print campaign prominently visible in 20 airports around the world. With 24 creative executions, the thought-provoking print campaign explores different themes and perspectives on what ambition means to different people in different places. This supports the global financial institution’s goal to inspire people to realize their hopes, dreams and ambitions, and in doing so, positions itself as a natural partner to support them on their journey.

According to Andrea Newman, Global Head of Marketing, Wealth and Brand Communications, at HSBC, “With this campaign, we want to poke or nudge our customers to stop and think about their own broader ambitions and reflect on where they are going in life.” I’ve always admired J. Walter Thompson’s approach to making airport jet bridges a unique communications channel associated with the HSBC brand for the last 15 years. The print campaign, particularly the photos orchestrated by Dan Burn-Forti, a New York photography agency, always makes me stop and admire, but more importantly, think about its relevance to my own life.

My last example of effective advertising is PepsiCo’s current Chinese New Year short films exploring millennial kids’ relationships with their boomer parents. AdAge profiled a 15-minute ad for PepsiCo’s Lay’s revolving around a successful actor who never manages to make it home for the holidays. The ad stars Lin Gengxin, a rising Chinese star, and it was produced by local agency Civilization. There is also a family pup, named Le, or “Happy,” a character in the Chinese version of Lay’s name – a brilliant nod to the arrival of the Year of the Dog in the Lunar New Year.

There are at least two other PepsiCo short advertising films around the same theme of inter-generational tensions and love between parents and children that got circulated on YouTube and resent many times among my Chinese friends all over the world. All of these films feature big-name or rising stars in China who are also popular everywhere among Chinese communities. The films are telling touching stories and pulling the heartstrings of boomer parents. The word-of-mouth endorsement and YouTube fever around these commercials are solid evidence of the campaign’s success.

A successful marketing campaign should always have a positive impact on the company’s bottom line. I’m not sure how much new business has the Questrade commercial generated, but according to a recent Euromonitor International report on China, Coca-Cola still maintained its leadership in soft drinks in 2017, albeit with a slightly shrinking value share compared to that in 2016. The Globe and Mail also reported that the fourth-quarter profit at HSBC Bank Canada dipped 20 percent lower than a year ago while its global parent has been shedding jobs and undertaking a turnaround strategy. Sexy and thought-provoking ads might resonate with consumers, but still might not be enough to make the cash register ring.

Photo Credit: US News Money

I seldom write book reviews on this blog. But when I come across a book that is aligned with my blog’s raison d’etre, I’m willing to make an exception. It took me two months to finish Joseph F. Coughlin’s new book, The Longevity Economy, but I remember the book’s subtitle, “Unlocking The World’s Fastest-Growing, Most Misunderstood Market,” attracted me to purchase it on my Kindle in the first place. And having finished the book, I am more convinced that Coughlin’s rationale behind his book was similar to mine when I first started my blog in 2007.

Coughlin is the founder and director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) AgeLab, upon which I relied for research behind a number of my blog posts. What I like about his book is that it’s not just one man’s or a small group’s opinion; but all the premises in the book were backed by science and research. The book describes how companies can prepare for an aging world and capitalize on the opportunity to tap the US$8 trillion market.

In the author’s interview with USA Today when the book first came out last November, Coughlin said that companies think they understand the aging market, but they really don’t. Companies often perceive that “older people are always takers, never givers; always consumers, never producers. And as a result, companies make products that, at their core, are designed for passive participants in society.” But older people are increasingly leading an active life and demand to be active participants. This is the major disconnect that makes so many companies unprepared for an aging world.

Like me, Coughlin also believes that the aging cohort is not homogeneous. He said that the set of “older adults” contains people of every conceivable kind: ethnicity, religion, sexuality, medical status, political affiliation – and anything else you could name, other than age. But even if we personally know older people who defy the stereotypes, most of us still paint the idea of “older people” with a single, insanely wide mental brushstroke. I’ve always said that the boomer demographic spans a 20-year age gap, and that alone implies that no one single formula would be able to apply in terms of marketing to boomers. Leading-edge (older) boomers have different needs from trailing-edge (younger) boomers and only customized solutions, also taking into account their ethnic, gender, sexual, medical and political backgrounds, work well and effectively.

Coughlin also said that a new generation of older adults is beginning to demand far more out of later life than ever before. They are not looking for passive consumerism, but the active pursuit of meaning in life. So companies and marketers should come up with products and services that are designed to support them on their journey.

When asked by USA Today about who will be the agents of change in the new world of longer life and older age, he pointed out that women, particularly those of middle age and above, are likely to be the leaders in identifying new wants and needs on the aging frontier. They will also be the ones to come up with demands in the form of products.  This is nothing new. We already know that women typically live longer than men. We also know that marketers and advertisers have always labelled women as the chief consumer officer or chief influencer of the home and they make purchasing decisions in key consumer categories including the automotive, health, and many other sectors. It’s also common knowledge that women provide more eldercare than men. What’s enlightening is that Coughlin pointed out that the research done by the MIT AgeLab suggests that women enter old age with a clearer, more detailed picture of what’s ahead. The firsthand knowledge that comes from being the primary buyer and caregiver gives them a unique vantage in understanding what products, services and experiences are effective as they respond to the challenges and demands of old age.

Coughlin said it’s a sad truth that women are often invisible to the investment and technology communities. That’s why the needs and wants they are responsible for go unanswered and the tools they deserve never get built. I’ve also pointed out many times that the advertising and marketing community keeps hiring young people to innovate for and advertise to the older market which is far from ideal. Coughlin mentioned in his book that when young people attempt to innovate for the older market, the same stuff comes up again and again: pill reminders, fall detectors, emergency response technologies. This is evidence that young people can’t get past the idea that older people are a medical problem to be solved. He said that smart venture capital companies, should instead, bet on older women’s ideas of what innovative products or services that would help older people lead a positive, meaningful life.

Seven years ago when I gave a keynote speech at the Digital Divas Conference in Toronto, I was advocating that companies should come up with innovative products and services that would focus on wellness and life enhancement solutions that would help improve boomers’ quality of life. It is, therefore, gratifying to see that Coughlin believes that there is a huge demand for products that will actively excite and delight older adults for decades to come. Marketers need to help the greying population “celebrate life in old age while they’re alive.” And may I add to that: make grey the new green!

Photo Credit: people.com

About two-and-a-half years ago, I have posted an article on this blog lauding two luxury brands featuring older models – Joni Mitchell for Yves Saint Laurent and Joan Didion for Celine. The excitement about the then 71-year-old Mitchell and 80-year-old Didion emerging as the newest fashion faces generated a lot of buzz and attention in the media. I questioned at that time whether it was really a marketing campaign acknowledging diversification or just a promotional gimmick. It looks like the fashion and beauty industries are really waking up and embracing mature women and models.

Nobody made bigger news recently than iconic actresses Jane Fonda and Helen Mirren making their debut appearances on the fashion runway for LOreal during the Paris Fashion Week this year. The 79-year-old Fonda and 72-year-old Mirren have been trailblazers all their lives, and now they are brand ambassadors for a leading beauty and cosmetics brand. Fonda has always been comfortable in her own skin in spite of her age. In 2016, she told the Daily Mail that after she turned 60, she began to understand who she was and she became young again. She said she is feeling pretty good about life now that she is in sight of her 80th birthday. She repeated the same observations in a recent TV interview with Megyn Kelly on NBC.

These septuagenarian brand ambassadors are not the only ones walking the runway with the hottest young models such as Gigi Hadid. Last month,it was announced that Maye Musk, 69, was the new face of CoverGirl, making her one of the oldest ambassadors for the brand. Having been modelling since she was 15, Musk is, of course, no stranger to the world of beauty and fashion. What is noticeable is her continued success, as she ages, as a brand ambassador in an industry which has traditionally been perceived as skin-deep superficial. In an interview with Vogue last year, Musk said: I hope my success gives other women hope that they can look good and feel good when they are past 60. I was on a shoot yesterday, and the young models were so excited to see me because they say it gives them hope, too, that they can carry on.

The accomplishments of Musk are, of course, beyond the fashion runway and photo shoots. She is the mother of three successful adult children including Elon Musk, Founder, CEO and CTO of SpaceX and co-founder and CEO of Tesla Inc. This Regina-born grandmother, with 10 grandkids and also a successful business as a dietitian, perfectly exemplifies brains and timeless beauty.

The list of mature models does not stop here. Versace also featured former supermodels of the 1990s – Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Helena Christensen, Claudia Schiffer and Carla Bruni – in its latest runway show. These mature women walked the runway alongside the new guard, including the daughter of Crawford, Kaia Gerber, and the current reigning supermodels Gigi and Bella Hadid.

Even Zara, the Spanish fast-fashion brand popular among young women around the world, is using three veteran models over 40 to showcase its new Timeless Fall and Winter Collection. In marketing campaign materials and on its website, the three beautiful women – Malgosia Bela (40), Yasmin Warsame (41) and Kristina de Connick (53) – discuss the effect of aging on their personal style. The ladies have collectively walked for Dior, Valentino, Givenchy and Dries van Noten.

Gucci, Dolce and Gabbana, and Loewe have also followed suit in recent years, hiring older Hollywood stars, such as Vanessa Redgrave, Sophia Loren and Charlotte Rampling, as brand ambassadors. Age diversity seems to be increasingly in vogue now on fashion runways for the past few seasons: Amber Valleta walked the runway for Tom Ford; Stella Tennant for Ralph Lauren; and Carolyn Murphy for Michael Kors.

Perhaps everything old is really new again! As I have said before on this blog, the fashion and beauty industries are finally realizing that the consumers buying their products are no longer just spring chickens, but mature women with more disposable income. Let us hope that this awakening to the aging reality is not simply a fad and mature women and men will no longer become invisible as they age.

It’s encouraging to see that The Economist has been focusing more on the positive aspects of aging populations in the last few years. As recently as three years ago in April 2014, the publication has dedicated a cover story to “A Billion Shades of Grey,” advocating changes in government policies to help accommodate the aging population. But the tone of that cover issue was more doom and gloom than positive – the concern about economic stagnation caused by the huge wave of baby boomers’ retirement was loud and clear in that story.

Then, in the April 9, 2016 edition of The Economist, the tone has become more positive with the article titled, “Older Consumers Will Reshape The Business Landscape.” The article advocated that companies should speed up in targeting this expanding “grey” market and cited examples of businesses around the world with innovative ideas appealing to older consumers. I’ve also echoed this view with my blog post last year titled, “Marketers Gradually Understand Potential Of Boomers.”

So I read with great delight the Special Report on The Economics Of Longevity in the July 8-14, 2017 issue of The Economist again. The report has basically argued that “if employers, businesses and financial services adapt to make far more of such people (the older population), big economic benefits for everyone could follow.” Employers need to change their attitudes towards older employees – ageist recruitment practices need to be discarded and corporate cultures have to change. Instead of reducing productivity and, therefore, hurting the economy, academics have found that older people in multi-generation teams tend to boost the productivity of those around them, and such mixed teams perform better than younger, single-generation ones.

The publication also argued that the second thing that needs to happen is for the benefits of longer, healthier lives to be spread much more equitably. There is currently too much of a gap between the rich and the poor among the older generation, and the best way to resolve this issue is for governments to invest in public health, offer universal access to healthcare and provide high-quality education for everyone. Although the report cited Canada as a good example of a country that manages to attach great importance to such matters, we see and read Canadian media reports everyday that lament how the older generation has not saved enough and cannot afford to retire.

I believe there is a third thing that needs to change: the marketing community and the media need to direct their energy and attention to the greying population. Over the last decade, there has been lacklustre progress in marketing to older people because this is not perceived as sexy. Young people continue to dominate marketing departments and think that the best place for the old is out of sight, out of mind. Although change is in the air, it is not happening fast enough. From aging rockers such as The Rolling Stones who can still fill huge concert arenas; to recent retirees who take on second careers as giggers and entrepreneurs; to older consumers who display young and active tastes in adventure travel and dating websites, “the new old” is defying old age and refusing to disappear into their sunset years.

In fact, The Economist is asking for a new branding of those over 65 but not yet elderly. The youngest Canadian boomers turn 51 and the oldest turn 70 this year. I used to call those people aged 65-70 “leading-edge boomers” and the younger ones “trailing-edge boomers”. But, perhaps, the marketing community can put their heads together and start coining a sexier term. Don’t call this group seniors although they are technically senior citizens. Baby boomers are starting to retire in large numbers in better health and with more money to spend than any previous generations. We feel much younger than our parents did at their age, and most of us have no intention of quietly disappearing from the world. The sooner the market can respond to this huge opportunity, the better our economy will be.

Photo Credit: southeastdiscovery.com

I was both frustrated and pleased to read the article Older Consumers Will Reshape The Business Landscape in the April 9th edition of The Economist. I was pleased because I was flattered that an esteemed publication like The Economist shares pretty much the same insights as mine some nine years ago when I first started this blog. In 2007 on this blog’s home page, I wrote, “Very few companies have fully realized the immense opportunity that baby boomers present for their businesses. As marketers, we must consider the needs of this demographic now, more than ever, as the aging population increasingly grows in importance.” The British magazine echoed the same sentiments: “Yet companies have been relatively slow to focus on this expanding market – certainly slower than they were to attend to the youth-quake (a term coined by Diana Vreeland, the editor-in-chief of Vogue in 1965, to describe how baby boomers were shaking up popular culture).”

The Economist now replaced this term with a “grey-quake” instead. The potential of baby boomers as a marketing target is huge, not just in Canada, but worldwide. According to the publication, those over 60 constitute the fastest-growing group in the populations of rich countries, with their number set to increase by more than a third by 2030, from 164m to 222m. Older consumers are also the wealthiest and the over-60s currently spend some $4 trillion a year and that number will grow.

But I was frustrated because it seems like marketers have made very little progress in targeting the greying population. The publication pointed out that The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) calculates that less than 15% of firms have developed a business strategy focused on the elderly. The magazine’s sister organization, The Economist Intelligence Unit, found that only 31 percent of firms it polled did take into account increased longevity when making plans for sales and marketing.

I’ve always said that one of the main reasons for this lacklustre progress is because marketing to older people is not perceived as sexy. The other reason, as pointed out by The Economist, is that young people dominate marketing departments and think that the best place for the old is out of sight and mind. Apparently, Britain is no different from North America. A study by fast.Map, a marketer, and Involve Millennium, a consultant, found 68 percent of British 65-74-year-olds “don’t relate” to advertising that they see on television.

Because most greying baby boomers consider themselves at least 10 years younger than their age, the surest way of alienating them is to talk down to them or treat them as old. When Procter & Gamble repackaged some of its dental products as “selected for aged 50-plus consumers,” its sales plunged. In the U.K., Bridgestone made a mistake by promoting a new line of golf clubs as one for pensioners, thus producing poor sales.

However, The Economist said that “change is in the air.” A report by the Mckinsey Global Institute (MGI) points out that older consumers are one of the few engines of growth in an otherwise sluggish global economy. While BRIC countries are drastically slowing down in growth and millennials around the world suffer from the twin burdens of student debt and the lingering impact of the 2008 financial crisis, the older demographic seems to be the only hope for despondent marketers. MGI calculates that pensioners in the developed world spend an average of $39,000 on consumption compared with $29,500 for the 30-44 age group. The publication pointed out that “the old are becoming the new new thing.”

In Japan, NTT DoCoMo not only produced a phone with large keys and a big display screen, but also redesigned its marketing, promoting the new phones during bus tours for pensioners and providing classes in shops to explain the ins-and-outs of apps. Electronics manufacturers are also producing devices that are designed specifically for old people. For instance, Independa, based in the U.S., manufactures a monitor that sends an alert if something goes south for an elderly person, making it easier for the frail senior citizen to stay in their own homes rather than to move to nursing homes.

New, innovative ideas appealing to older consumers also appear to be on the rise in Canada. I’ve posted on this blog on November 11, 2014 about the launch of a Canadian venture, Blaycation (www.blaycation.com), a bucket-list travel adventure company providing customized, curated luxury-focused travel for baby boomers. Since its launch, the company has been doing well as an online travel planner for baby boomers and mature adventure seekers. Its website features over 20 personally-designed tours that include many exotic travel destinations and bucket-list adventures including an Irish Castle Aristocratic Experience hosted by the 7th Earl of Erne.

Although I remain skeptical about how long it has taken marketers to focus on the mature population, it is encouraging to see that companies around the world are making an effort to take the older population more seriously. Marketers should really take heed when one of the most influential publications in the world is hopeful that baby boomers will continue to change everything they’ve touched, including retirement!