Knowing How Boomers Think Can Make You a Better Marketer
How many times have you heard the axiom know your customer? It’s not enough to know their age and demographics. To be a truly effective marketer you need to know how they think. Boomers are not the aged or elderly. These are two very different categories and understanding how they differ makes a world of difference in how you market to them
Each generation has its own distinct set of values and beliefs regarding family, career, the work/life balance, training and development, loyalty, gender roles, the work environment, and expectations of leaders. Unless you really understand the differences you can’t effectively motivate and market to them. Lumping them together is a communication disaster.
Boomers by and large had it very good. They were graduating just as the market was entering its greatest era of expansion. Jobs were plentiful and costs were dropping as a result of post war productivity investments. Their bosses had been influenced by the war and passed on a respect for authority but boomers had a strong trait of cockiness they never lost.
In contrast, the generation before them (traditionalists or pre-boomers) were caught up in the aftermath of two World Wars. They learned thrift in a way the boomers never did.
To be effective you need to think of:
- Pre-Boomers (Today’s elderly)
- Early Boomers
- Late Boomers
They have different backgrounds but to some degree they are all suffering from different levels of brain deterioration.
The Early Boomers
Cold War anticommunism and pro-corporatism merged with the suburban ideal of a white picket fence and a car in every driveway. Those who did not fit into the ideal suburban, middle-class, married, or white family structure faced stigmatization. In the US, African American female household heads were frequently held accountable for their own poverty and their children were marginalized.
These attitudes made it possible to both formally and informally deny young, poor women of colour access to a variety of health and social services throughout the 1950s and 1960s.
In Canada they were from a larger assortment of nationalities and ghettoized. Remember neither Canada, nor the US was very good at accepting Jewish refugees.
You need to remember the boomer generation also thought they were in an age of technological innovation, so parents turned to experts such as Dr. SPOCK, who encouraged positive reinforcement and full-time parental devotion to affectionate child-raising.
They also believed in the leader as hero – The John Wayne syndrome.
Boomer childhoods were filled with vast institutional, social, and media attention. Little League and the Boy/Girl Scouts exploded. Churches in the US enjoyed a rise in membership from 64.5 million in 1940 to 114.5 million in 1960. They were not the world we are in today. Television was a rare phenomenon and they were black and white. TOYS were just beginning to shift from parent-directed play to advertiser-led consumption. BARBIE, for example, was introduced in 1959, just as older boomers headed into adolescence; BARBIE modeled a teenage lifestyle of carefree consumerism rather than an idealization of motherhood or family.
In the early postwar years, there was still no widespread birth control; premarital intercourse just became more common. The Birth Control Pill hit the market in 1960, and although it would cause massive attitude changes, the adjustment to acceptance took time. Mod clothing, rock music, birth control and drugs changed everything. Together, they fuelled young people's insistence on free love and free expression.
By the late 1960s, anti-materialist youth aesthetics were conjoined with teens who had higher disposable incomes and greater recreational expenditures than any previous generation and an awakening to mass protests against the Vietnam war.
The Late Boomers
Early boomers were born between 1946 and 1955; late boomers were born 1956 through 1964. They were in many ways the generation's forgotten members. American society was less invested in raising them as "ideal" children than it was in simply managing them.
Teenagers in the 1970s, in large part, retreated from political activity into a consumer-based exploration of peer-based belonging. Recreational drug use rose dramatically, and due in part to the women's movement and sexual liberation, teens experienced a gradual shifting away from formalized steady courtship toward heterosexual group socializing with more informal dating and sexual relations.
Pre- Boomers - Traditionalists
Pre-boomers and early boomers appear to the young marketer as just “Older People” “They have more trouble learning and remembering because their minds tend to be cluttered with more memories and irrelevant information”- Karen Li professor, Concordia University
A recent study instructed participants divided by age to complete certain tasks related to memory management. The participants were divided by young and old. The younger participants were an average of 23 years old and the older half was an average age of 67 years old. Both groups were asked to perform a working memory task, which included recalling and processing different pieces of information. "Overall, it showed that not surprisingly older participants had reduced working memory compared to younger participants."
The researchers then tested inhibition deletion -- ability to delete irrelevant information -- using a sequential 
memory task. Images were displayed in a random order and all participants were required to respond to each image in a pre-learned manner. Once again, the younger adults outperformed the older participants.
The older adults had poor inhibition, repeatedly responding to previously relevant images. "Basically, older adults are less able to keep irrelevant information out of their consciousness, which then impacts on other mental abilities."
This seems to imply they are less reliant on reason to determine what is of interest, and more on intuition which is most often cued by emotional responses. In advertising this means we should identify and employ images that promote strong positive emotional responses.
For early and pre- boomers even more than for boomers and young people relationship building must precede the presentation of brand benefits Young people may react quicker so we think they rely more on gut. There is an old saying “I think it therefore it is true. Many adults think this is the way youth think because they believe young people think they are the first to discover new things. This is true. We all attribute new ideas to us, as bona fide new ideas.
The study however seems to imply boomers are even more reliant on “gut instinct” and give it more value rather than rationally deduced logic”. First impressions (which are always emotionally based) are more durable and more difficult for boomers to reverse than for younger adults.
Marketers therefore need to be more sensitive to images that can stimulate negative first impressions when advertising to boomers. It is probable that the strongest sources of negative impressions for boomers are images that conflict with idealized image of self, especially with respect to autonomy and sense of personal validity.
Then once a matter qualifies for interest and further attention, baby boomers tend to want more information than do younger consumers and they need it presented in a more easy to comprehend manner. (And you thought it was young people that had attention deficit).
Early Boomers and pre-boomers are also more resistant to absolute propositions. It makes sense, they have been burned more often and have more to protect - Think of Bernie Madoff’s 50 billion dollar ponzi scheme.
They are also more sensitive to metaphorical meanings, nuances and subtleties. Just think of who most attends church. So take advantage of greater sensitivities to subtlety to expand the content of the message, especially in terms of meta- values, values that transcend the generic value of the service and expand its perceived attractiveness. Nonverbal symbols are particularly effective in accomplishing this.
Both early Boomers and Boomers are more receptive to narrative-styled presentations of information, less responsive to information presented in expository style. Stories are generally quicker to arouse emotions than straight-forward propositions about a product’s features. Think Coca Cola, Hallmark Cards and Nike’s Just Do It campaign. They surpass most brands in using stories to present products.
As the left brain deteriorates you want to keep the emotional messaging simple without conflicting information being presented. (Left brain functioning decreases in midlife – emed.com)
Until just a few years ago, doctors believed that the brain stopped making new neural connections - meaning that the memory began to get irreversibly worse - when the body stopped developing, usually in the early 20s. Like any other part of the body, neurons weaken as people age. Loss of brain function due to neural breakdown was assumed to be a normal, unavoidable part of aging. However more recent studies have evidence that indicates you can, in fact, make new neurons starting in your 20s and continuing well into old age. You can literally rewire the brain with new parts as the older parts wear out. Unfortunately most boomers are only now starting to do what is necessary to make this happen.
By the way humour also helps Dr S.R. Schmidt from the Department of Psychology, Middle Tennessee State University has conducted extensive studies that prove humorous sentences were better remembered than the non humorous sentences on both free- and cued-recall tests
Understanding how a baby boomer’s brain and mind processes information is key to effective communications. If an ad, TV or radio spot, web site, or sales presentation fails to connect with a baby boomer’s idealized image of self, it is more likely to be ignored.
To learn how to become a master marketer and communicate better with your customers Click Here for the SEEC Masters of Marketing Communication Leadership Program.
Dr. Karen Li is a research specialist in cognitive and attentional processes involved in multiple-task performance in adulthood and healthy aging. An important theme in her research is to understand the adaptive strategies that older adults develop in response to declines in cognitive and sensorimotor abilities. She is a member and Associate Director of the Centre for Research in Human Development (CRDH
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