Retirement looms....

or does it???????? Will I be a tottering 70 year old working to pay for my orthopaedic sandals?

The Baby Boom Pig moves on. A fairly recent story in the Christian Science Monitor (Admakers turn to Europe's Rising Gray Set - March 16, 2005) describes the gradual turning of European marketers towards capturing boomer consumer euros.

Yet another confirmation that marketing departments in the developed world, at least, are realizing that their campaigns need to change from the perennial focus on youth hype to the more "mature" market. OK, you'd have to be pretty dumb NOT to go after us as a hungry, if not desperate, market on the verge of making a ton of new purchases.

In England, the creative director of one marketing consultancy called Millennium Direct, says " It's sheer numbers. In the 60s, 70s, and 80s it made all the sense in the world to focus on youth, because that's where the bumps were as the baby boom pig moved through the demographic python. Now these people are all over 45. And people between 45 and 59 have the most disposable income of any age group in the population". Speak for yourself and the cold statistics, says I.

In Britain over the next 20 years, the population of people over 75 will leap by 45%. And in Europe as a whole, the proportion of people over 65 will increase from 12% today to 28.5%.

Yet, far from feeling addressed and coddled by the marketers, a recent market survey conducted by Millennium reported that 86% of surveyed seniors feel ignored and 70% felt patronized. One woman who runs a French modeling agency complains, "For advertisers, either you are young and beautiful and you consume, or you are old and you buy nothing but recliners. They see nobody in between, but that doesn't match reality". Hey, don't forget all the drugs and adult diapers they're throwing in our faces on TV and in the mags.

Well some companies are beginning to wake up and smell the Viagra. One German marketing firm has created "Age Explorer" suits so that marketing people can dress up and feel like older people - that is, they wear goggles that dim their eyesight, wear suits that prohibit easy movement of their joints, and lug around 13 pounds of extra weight. One marketing person realized, after her try at wearing the suit, that she didn't' want to have consumer items up on such high shelves where older people couldn't see or reach as easily. Now you're getting it! Are we the first Americans to grow old?

McDonald's in Italy is running ads where grandparents and grandchildren have their feet up on tables in their restaurants happily munching on burgers together. (I can just see this becoming a trend.) One of Alfa Romeo's new tag lines is "the car for all ages". Harley Davidson has already realized that the average age of their consumers has risen from 38 to 46 in the last ten years! And one bottled water company, Danon, recently launched a product aimed at 60-year-olds, i.e. the water had lots of added magnesium and calcium and the bottles were easy to hold and had enlarged caps that were easy to remove.

And just to keep us in character, there's this: Marketers report that the perception of their ages by older people differs from their actual ages by about 15 years. So to attract 65 year olds, they need to feature models that look about 50 years old in their ads. (I'm doing the math...so for me to consider buying something, the spokesperson has to look about 45? What does 45 look like these days???) I dunno.