The Power of the (Older) Purse
People over 50 make over 50% of consumer spending decisions and hold 83% of US wealth. But you wouldn’t guess this if you were analysing most companies’ marketing or product development strategies. Despite the sweeping impact of one of the biggest demographic shifts the world has ever seen, with the number of 65+ soon to outnumber the under 18s, companies have seemed largely disinterested in the data flipping oldward – everywhere.
Susan Golden’s new book, Stage (Not Age), should incite more businesses to rebalance their attentions across longer lives and careers. A venture capitalist and Stanford Business School professor with a background in public health, Golden is well positioned to convincingly sell the huge, global opportunity she describes. Here’s a summary of seven suggestions she makes for everyone from established corporates to budding entrepreneurs.
1. Follow the Money
In the US alone, the longevity economy, including the jobs, services and products being created to support longer lives is worth more than $8.6 trillion. That swells, says Golden, to $22 trillion globally. Rather than seeing the 50+ population as a soon-to-be decrepit stage of life, it’s time to update our collectively sticky stereotypes. The new reality of life’s third and fourth quarters is increasingly healthy, active and engaged. This large and fast-growing segment also makes most of the buying decisions and holds the vast majority of the nation’s wealth (83%). Ignore them at your peril. Most companies still do, preferring to target the 18- to 34-year-old demographic they are convinced represents the future. The future is greyer (and more female) than most company’s current practices (and talent) suggest. Getting ahead on this shift should offer a clear competitive edge.
2. Don’t Call Them ‘Old’
Only 35 percent of people over 75 consider themselves old, so calling them old may not be the best way to sell to them. Rob Chess of Stanford Business School recommends a ‘stealth’ strategy when communicating with the second-half-of-lifers. Since most of them don’t see themselves as old, and are still busy working, caring or considering themselves to be ‘forever athletes,’ marketing that pitches to elders, seniors and even sages may be dead in the water. NIKE discovered this when designing the CruzrOne, a running shoe for the ‘slower’ set. It was inspired by NIKE Founder Phil Knight when he was in his 80s and needing a shoe to keep running in – just a bit slower. NIKE added it ‘stealthily’ to their range, and found it was bought by people of all ages who wanted more support and less speed. Golden also points to eyeglass company Warby Parker who’s original trendy line of glasses didn’t include bifocals. Until they understood after a couple of years that they were leaving half the potential market behind. Rather than shifting their hip look, they brought hip to the traditionally sobre bifocal, delighting the old by not dulling them down.
3. Watch Your Words
Golden acknowledges a real problem around vocabulary, and how everyone is dancing around terms that no one wants to be known by. She found more than fifty labels to refer to the ‘new old’ and merrily categorises them by metaphor – the colors (grey, silver or gold), flowers (perennial blooms) and letters (Gen A, B or R) running amok to grapple with the emerging wave. She even launched a Naming Project at Stanford to try and get something with broad appeal to emerge. Disappointingly, it was inoffensiveness that limped forward with the winner going to … ‘older adult.’ Interestingly, it underscores that this group simply doesn’t want to be categorized at all, and that almost any age-related moniker will do more harm than good. Marketers are forewarned.
4. Frame Life in Quarters
We need a new roadmap for longer lives, and Golden presents a number of overlapping concepts here. She breaks life into five quarters (with the mathematically problematic fifth quarter being ‘extra time’ past the now oft-predicted 100-year-lifetime). As a subscriber to the Quarters idea, I applaud her adoption of it as a simple framework around which to understand phase shifts in adulthood. Her overlapping Five Quarters are:
- Starting (0-30) – starting school, work, and families
- Growing (25-55) – building adult lives with work explorations, transitions, breaks and learning
- Renaissance (55-85) – repurposing, rejuvenating and reevaluating with more education and upskilling.
- Legacy (75-100) – assessing healthspans, defining legacies
- Extra (100+) – bonus time!
She then adds to the five quarters with 18 phases spread across four phases (growth, career and family, reinvention and closing) which gets a bit complicated. But given that today companies lump the 50 or 60+ into a single category, a little complexity is welcome. It will be useful for the marketing and product design people to dig into the real and growing diversity of life’s second half.
5. Balance Generationally
Balancing internal talent to reflect external customers will be as relevant in the age space as it has been in the gender and diversity spaces. Golden describes Merrill Lynch’s efforts to embrace the ageing trend among clients by reorienting the firm around the reality. They established a 7 Life Priorities program to pace their products and hired the financial world’s first gerontologist in 2014 to equip their teams with the skills and understanding to serve an evolving market. It then used the framework to respond to its own employees’ lives, says Golden, by starting to offer elder care benefits and end-of-life flexibility and support. She also explores the 5-generation workforce and how inter-generational teams will be better prepared to respond to the longevity dividend while recognising the challenges of today’s often ageist corporate contexts.
6. The Future (More Than Ever) Is Female
The customer is complex in the longevity space. It’s a collection of end users, buyers, payers and influencers. It’s also often female. Companies, she advises, will want to learn about women’s different life stages to be able to anticipate needs and accompany them through. Women will be the “largest target audiences for products and services. They live longer than men. More women live alone through more stages. More age in place. More continue working through several stages. And more women tend to be the major purchasers and influencers for their families.” We’ve been saying this for some time, since Marti Barletta wrote the ever relevant Primetime Women back in 2014. So if you are interested in longevity, most of the experts will agree, get interested in what women want – as employees and as consumers.
7. Think Further – and Furtherhood
Golden’s book is a welcome contribution to the growing pile of books on the longevity economy. Not least because so many of them seem to be written by men - when the opportunity they describe is so clearly led by women. The issues of ageing and longevity are intrinsically linked and overlap with gender in a myriad of ways. This book is brimful of case studies introducing companies who are innovating their way into an entirely new demographic and social reality. The 21st century will be defined by the companies and countries who successfully manage the shift. This book shines a light on what that might look like. If you’d like to look a bit further, you may want to adopt Golden’s own choice for this phase of life – furtherhood. A time for all of us to go further, hopefully together.
