Where Do I Fit In?

With my retirement just seven months away, advertisers are ready to have their way with me. In fact, with 37,000,000 American over the age of 65 and another 30,000,000 projected to reach this milestone within the next ten years, researchers continue to find new ways to slice and dice the senior marketplace. Once again, baby boomers are on the cutting edge of something, even though some of us are doing all we can, including plastic surgery, to hang onto our youth.

We’re special in other ways, too.

Here’s what Blaine Branchik, an associate professor of marketing at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut, has to say about us. (Quoted in “Six Decades at the Center of Attention and Counting”, The New York Times, 1/6/2008.)

“Seniors, particularly baby boomers, each believe they belong to a market segment made up of exactly one person. Many believe the only thing they have in common is that they are all so unique that they have nothing in common.”

It seems as though some of us took way too many drugs back in the 60s and 70s. How else to explain such delusions?

On the other hand, maybe we’re not as conformist as consultants would like to lead marketers to believe. According to the article cited above, Age Wave, a consulting firm which brazenly promotes itself as “the nation’s foremost thought-leader on population aging and its profound business, social, and cultural implications”, has divvied up “post-retirement” consumers into four categories.

“Ageless Explorers.” Rich retirees who respond to images of silver-haired scuba-divers reinventing themselves in their waning years.

“Comfortably Contents”. Also wealthy, but more attracted to scenes of fishermen, friendly dogs, and rocking chairs. They want to spend their final years free from the responsibilities of work, social obligations and worrying about anything else.

(Are you laughing yet? Do you get the feeling that Age Wave conducted its research on Mars?)

“Live for Todays”. Wish they could relax, but didn’t save much, so their financial anxieties make them easy targets for Costa Rican retirement communities and thrifty insurance plans.

“Sick and Tireds”. Basically ready to die, attracted to anything that makes the waiting less painful, particularly if it costs less than $19.95. (All sarcasm aside, this link provides some useful information that puts this 2002 reserach announcement into perspective, providing the percentage of people in each group, average household income, and average net worth.)

(Still, I wish I were making some of this stuff up.)

Sounds like the retirement is a case of the haves and have-nots, both financially and psychologically. I suspect gray areas don’t exist in the marketing world. (And based on the latest batch of Super Bowls ads, not much reasoned thinking, either.)

My 87-year-old mother, whom marketers probably don’t care about anyway, doesn’t fit any of the above categories. I’d call her “comfortably content”, though she’s certainly not wealthy, has never fished a day in her life, and hasn’t owned a dog since she was a girl growing up in Springfield, Massachusetts. And she prefers recliners to rockers.

For that matter, I don’t see any place for me in Age Wave’s view of retirement. And that’s just fine with me, especially if it means fewer calls from telemarketers. (But I’m not keeping my fingers crossed on that one.)