My parents are not the target demographic for most brands. Like me they don’t see themselves represented on screen. Even the old guy from the Werther’s Original advert doesn’t appear any more.
Spending some time with them recently allowed me to see what brands might be missing out on and how they related to brands.
Why are they not the target demographic?
Let’s do a thought experiment. If we asked marketers about why my parents aren’t the target demographic. There would likely be a range of answers and I am guessing that these would be prominent amongst them:
- They aren’t aspirational
- They aren’t culturally relevant
- We’re after lifetime spend, that means below 35
- We don’t understand them
- We can’t reach them
- They’ll have set behaviours
They aren’t aspirational
Neither are most brands, despite what marketers might want to think. Your supermarket is full of functional brands, as are utilities like electricity, gas suppliers, water board, broadband and mobile operators. You don’t virtue signal your status through being on Plusnet, but you might do through your iPhone. Funnily enough the accessibility features, simplicity of design and ease of my providing technical support means that they run an Apple household. They do want their house to look nice, be clean and are thinking about replacing their car. They’d like to go out and see things and maybe even do a bit of travel.
One fact from the Pew Research Centre surprised me, but spoke directly to aspiration. Retirement age people are twice as likely than the working population to be entrepreneurs working in self-employment. BBH interviewed 20 retirement age people in Britain and found that they strived for significance.
They aren’t culturally relevant
Neither is the advertising industry a lot of the time, despite attempts to diversify it is still overwhelmingly southern and middle class. If you go up north commercial dance music radio sounds very different from what you would hear in London.
Even clothing brands signalling are different. At the moment in Liverpool, locally designed apparel brand Montirex is more common than Gym Shark, Nike or Under Armour. Is this difference reflected in what we see from ad agencies? Often not.
The advertising industry isn’t culturally relevant for a lot of young people let alone older people who would be considered to be not the target demographic. Finally, ZAK pointed out in their work Learn to Time Travel that culture is cross-generational. And we can think of lots of tastemakers who are older: streetwear OGs like Alex Turnbull, Marc Fraser, Hiroshi Fujiwara, Nigo, John Landis or Michael Kopelman. Slightly younger designers like Yoon Ahn, who is in her late 40s, are barely hitting their stride.
We’re after lifetime spend, that means below 35
Most western countries are aging. In the UK’s case the average age of the population is 43. People are living longer, but also wealth / power to spend moving in favour of older people and has been for a good while.
We don’t understand them
As an industry we have little, if any understanding of older people. We don’t work with older people according to the IPA agency census. No one retired in advertising last year, only 7% of our industry are 50 or over. The average age of our industry is 34.6 years old, compared to the UK average of 43.
In the US, the Pew Research Centre, alongside the likes of Ofcom in the UK have published some basic research to get things started.
BBH London have tried to start learning more about older consumers with their Silver Culture Project.
And just like youth culture demanded attention 70 years ago, this too deserves to be seen, heard and celebrated.
One in five people in the UK is over 65.
In less than 20 years that will be one in four.*The over 65s hold over half of the UK’s wealth, with the average 65+ household having a net worth of £500k-£1 million.
We can’t reach them
I was reminded of a LinkedIn post by Steve Walls where he talked about how little of the adverts celebrated by the ad industry he actually saw when he wasn’t on LinkedIn. It’s a sentiment I could relate to. Stepping away from LinkedIn and watching evening television with my parents, I ended up watching more FMCG-related advertising than I had seen during my usual more online-based life.
I particularly liked the way Flash had doubled down and repeated the same creative for the past four years or so.
My Dad got a bit excited showing me the Twix bears. They were short listed for Cannes in 2022 and as an advert it just works regardless of age. My Dad beamed as he talked along with the bears word-for-word. Kit Kats have been displaced in his shopping trolley by Twix.
The Twix bears
My Dad also likes the Vitality dachshund and the Compare The Market meerkats. While its reassuring seeing that fluent objects, humour and creativity work for all generations, it also implies that despite him being not the target demographic media planners still seem to be doing a better job reaching my Dad compared to myself (or Steve Walls.)
There are some less memorable ads out there such Colgate Total’s dentist endorsement.
They’ll have set behaviours
This fails to recognise two things. Older people do change behaviour over time if it makes sense. You can see this is higher than expected level of technology adaptation by older generations. For instance, they are still using cashless payments, despite a lifetime of cash and cheque books.
They are technology users, including smartphones, but less of them are using social media (and that might not be a bad thing). More retirement age people are working than ever before, the number in the US has doubled in a decade.
In my parents case, behavioural change came partly due to COVID, they embraced Amazon to buy cleaning products, supplements, motor oil and vacuum cleaner spare parts.
Secondly, behaviour change is often forced upon them from medically induced changes such as giving up smoking. Then you have physical changes from less range of movement, hearing or vision to incontinence.
Some brands have tapped into this market.
Always Discreet
Procter & Gamble have extended their Always menstrual pad brand to cover incontinence due to aging. Discreet are underpants with a built in pad allowing users to continue having a normal life. Procter & Gamble has managed to move from ‘not the target demographic’ to new product innovation and brand extensions.
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