White Paper: Understanding Baby Boomers in the Digital Age
By Filip Lau, Morgan Ramsey-Elliot, Ian Dull, and Daniel Bird
Talk to any ad agency, market research firm or consultancy today, and they’ll offer an opinion on what Millennials want. Millennials have captured the collective imagination of corporations, marketers, media, online pundits, and frankly, Millennials themselves. Everyone is talking about them as the Next Big Baby Boom. But what about the original Baby Boomers? Marketers once spoke about them endlessly and aimed their cars, clothing, and day-to-day goods at them. Through our studies of the everyday lives of people, we have seen how Boomers still offers a huge opportunity for smart companies that understand what thrills them as they near their retirement.
Baby Boomers number 77 million in the US alone. They’re the wealthiest generation in history, owning roughly 70% percent of the wealth in the United States and set to inherit $15 trillion in the next 20 years. Not surprisingly then, they spend more than any other demographic in an astonishing 94% of consumer goods categories, accounting for 50 percent of all dollars spent on consumer goods in the United States. Despite this purchasing power, marketing to them has fallen out of style: most marketers today are more focused on selling them anti-incontinence products than the next premium car. Stereotypical images of retierees as passive, technophobes with little to spend, seems to be keeping companies from seeing how Baby Boomers are currently redefining what aging means.
So what is it that Baby Boomers really want in later life? And how can you successfully target them?
We have created a white paper together with Lester Lam from Cognizant Digital Works, providing an introduction to what we have called The Second Coming of Age for the Baby Boomer generation.
Read the full white paper as a pdf here.
RELATED CASE
Exploring conviviality with Pernod Ricard
Recently, Pernod Ricard and ReD have studied the baby boomer generation in Europe. For a company focusing its marketing usually to the 25 to 35 year olds it can be quite challenging to change the corporate mindset and allow a focus on an older generation. The study of baby boomers has made it clear that addressing this generation with relevant offerings holds a big commercial opportunity for the spirit maker. Read more about our work with Pernod Ricard here.
[Banner image by Tim Mossholder via Unsplash]