Marketing to baby boomers is booming. Companies have realized that this generation — 79 million strong — is active consumers and not following the patterns of previous generations.
“The size and spending power of boomers is large and substantial,” says Mike Hess, global research director at media firm OMD, and smart marketers have learned that they’re not tied to brands they’ve used, nor are they too old to switch.
Companies looking for a share of their spending include those that traditionally target an older demographic – such as financial services firms and makers of age-fighting cosmetics – but the advertising has a bit more edge than before.
And newcomers — such as dating site Match.com – are jumping into the battle for boomer bucks.
Among the marketing strategies:
Show “real” boomers doing bold things. Dove’s TV, Web and print marketing campaign for its new pro-age (as in not anti-age) line of beauty products includes discreet nude photos of real women 50 and older.
The ads are a response to a global Dove survey that found that 79 percent of women ages 50 to 64 do not see themselves as “older women,” says Dove’s marketing director, Kathy O’Brien. The poll of 1,450 women was done last June.
“These women believe they are too young to be called old,” she says. “We wanted to show that beauty has no age limit. We wanted to show true honest beauty, including gray hair and wrinkles.”
Target boomers with nontraditional services. Match.com has homed in on single boomers, and they’re the fastest-growing subscriber age group for the site that pairs singles. Since 2000, the number of boomers is up 350 percent, spokeswoman Amy Canaday says, to 1.7 million, or 11 percent of its membership.
A current TV ad for Match.com features a widowed New York woman age 71 whose Match.com logon is DanishBeauty22.
Using iconic, nostalgic personalities. Financial services firm Ameriprise Financial tapped Dennis Hopper for its recent ad campaign.
Hopper isn’t a baby boomer – he’s 70 – but boomers see the actor as “an older brother who’s been out there,” says Doug Pippin, a creative director at Ameriprise ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi.
“He’s lived true to himself, and he’s proved that you can do this your way.”
