Marketing Across the Senior Schism
I've recently been working on a campaign for one of our healthcare clients, targeting people who are eligible for Medicare, or soon will be -- basically anyone over sixty. It sounds simple enough, but in trying to think about the tone and feel of the campaign, my partner and I found ourselves bumping up against a major divide within this population. We had to speak simultaneously to a generation that came of age during World War II and the prosperous post-war years, and another—the Baby Boomers--whose identities were forged in the cultural upheaval of the sixties and seventies.
There's lots of talk out there about how to market to Boomers. We all know they're more active, educated and media-savvy than past "senior" generations, and there's big money to be made off of them. But the majority of the senior population is still composed of non-Boomers, and will be for a while, even as ballooning numbers of Boomers join the retiree ranks. (The oldest Boomers, remember, are only 62.)
This means that for now, marketing aimed at so-called seniors has to speak simultaneously to the generation that swung to Sinatra at their high school prom and the one that rocked out to the Rolling Stones; to the people who said "don't trust anyone over thirty" and the people that they were talking about.
How can marketers bridge the generation gap?
My opinion – perhaps a surprisingly uncynical one for a Gen-Xer – is that the best way is to find the emotional common ground: the concerns, fears, joys and hopes that everyone in this segment shares, regardless of whether they voted for Nixon or McGovern in 1972. Get past psychographics and demographics and think about common humanity:
Navigating the healthcare system is stressful, whether you're 65 or 90. Everybody wants to stay healthy and independent. Nobody wants to be a burden on their spouse or children. These are the kind of universal concerns we kept circling back to in our recent healthcare assignment.
The jury is still out on which of the campaigns we developed will actually run. But any of them—we hope—should strike a meaningful chord for everyone in the audience, regardless of their age.
