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Marketing To Baby Boomers – Is It A Game Of Chance?

by Jim Gilmartin – An esteemed colleague once told me that no category of business expense contains as much waste as marketing. The amounts are astounding. Some marketing-related activities are estimated to cost companies about $500 billion annually. There are those that consider that figure is double what it should be. That claim is not as outlandish as it might …

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How Boomers Revolutionized The Luxury Car Market

By Barry Robertson – The 2016 LA Auto Show opened on November 18 and will run through the Sunday after Thanksgiving. It gives Los Angelenos a chance to walk off all that turkey and holiday goodies. Who knows, maybe somewhere in the glittering array there are vehicles as transformative as in the 1990 show when the shiny new Lexus LS400 was on display. Thanks to …

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Marketing To Baby Boomers: Stories Connect

By Jim Gilmartin – Most of us love stories. That’s nothing new. However, marketers need to understand better the value of storytelling in communicating messages. As we age, stories play an even more important role in how our brains process information about your products and services. Jonas Kaplan of the University of Southern California published a study in January 2016 …

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Engage Boomers With Inclusive Branding: Four Lessons From Disneyland

By Barry Robertson – It all started with a mouse This past summer, Disneyland, Anaheim, went all out for its Diamond Celebration, with special events and spectaculars to commemorate its opening sixty years ago in July, 1955. As Walt Disney famously said, it all started with a mouse. In this case, Mickey Mouse cast as Steamboat Willie in the very first cartoon with synchronized sound. In today’s …

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Marketing to Grandparents

by Lori Bitter – Abraham Maslow never intended to be a marketer. But when it comes to creating products, services, and messaging for older adults, his “13 personality attributes of the self-actualizing person” from Toward a Psychology of Being provide focused guidelines for creating a great creative brief. Recall that self-actualization is the realization of one’s full potential, with a …

Boomers Refute the Logan’s Run School of Marketing

By Barry Robertson – 1970s thinking: Logan’s Run inspires 21st century advertisers One Boomer heyday sci-fi gem that never made it to Mystery Science Theater 3000 is the 1976 classic Logan’s Run. In the 23rd century, a post-apocalypse utopia thrives under a sealed dome, safe from the primitive remnants of the old order. The inhabitants enjoy an indulgent, hedonistic existence regulated by an all-caring computer. They …

Baby Boomer & Senior Marketing: An Eleven Point Strategic Approach

You won’t find the driver of improved sales to the Baby Boomer and senior customer in a company’s planning department or marketing/advertisement departments. You’ll find the origins of the problem of a distorted vision of the value of 50+ customers at the company leadership level. When large and small company leadership understand better the significantly shifting global demographics and communicate …

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Connect With Boomers Using Stage of Life Values

Baby Boomer and older customers are the single largest economic group in America, with annual spending power of more than $2 Trillion. But be careful what you call them. Euphemisms like “elder,” “of a certain age” or “senior” may not go over well. Many may become more than a little upset with being labeled. After all, they aren’t simply writing …