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The business world is starting to swarm around the huge opportunities
for marketing to Baby Boomers, a market segment that has annual
discretionary spending of $750 billion and controls more than 77% if
the U.S. financial assets. Over the next ten years 78 million Baby
Boomers will turn 50 years old. In less than two generations, there
will be 2 billion people over 60 and the elderly will outnumber
children for the first time.

The question among many marketers
is, “what marketing approaches and messages will appeal to Baby
Boomers?” Based on Foghound’s Boomer Market Watch, which daily monitors
30 key Boomer issues, we’re seeing three powerful themes:

1. Usefulness
2. Fear
3. Optimism

Usefulness

As we age, career quests and acquiring new things lose some of their
satisfaction. Instead, people seek to lead useful lives. Benjamin
Franklin once wrote, “I would rather have it said, ‘he lived usefully’
than ‘he died rich.’ Or, as a character in Marilynne Robinson’s new
book Gilead says, “To be useful was the best thing the old men ever
hoped for themselves; to be aimless was their worst fear.”

We
believe this message of usefulness will be extremely relevant to
Boomers. Here are just a few of the things we’ve begun to see that
support the appeal of the usefulness.

• For assisted living
  communities: market how your properties allow residents to continue to
  live useful lives. At a new type of assisted housing called the Green
  House Project, “residents take pride in doing things they hadn’t been
  able to do for years in their former nursing homes,” according to Newsweek International.
  “One resident actually cried when she was able to bake corn bread
  again, recalls project director Hude Rabig. “They really grab onto the
  fabric of life again.”
• For real estate developers: tap into
  the emerging trend of Boomers getting together in small groups to
  create postmodern elder families, eschewing the assisted living concept.
• Travel: market trips and destinations that allow grandparents to share
  new experiences – particularly cultural and educational — with their
  grandchildren. “After the gold watch, what you need to do is get work
  out of your vocabulary and pay attention to your fourth grade
  grandchildren. They have self-esteem without contributing to the GNP,”
  advises George Valiant, a Harvard Medical School psychiatrist who
  studies aging.
• VCs and technology and product designers: think
  cool canes, walkers with computers to identify obstacles, kitchen
  products for those with arthritis, new car designs that are hip yet
  taking into account physical realities. Keep an eye on what’s happening
  at MIT’s Community Innovation Lab.

Fear

The
second motivating message is fear. Here are some of the boomers’
greatest fears – all of which have opportunities for marketers:

• Becoming isolated and lonely. Losing friends. (Attention real estate
  developers, non-profits seeking volunteers, and employers looking for
  part-time workers.)
• Not having enough money and ending up in
  nursing homes. “Residents who leave assisted living usually do so not
  because they die but because they run out of money, and go to nursing
  homes,” according to a recent New York Times article. “There
  the impoverished, including middle-class men and women who have
  outlived their savings, are covered by Medicaid as they are not (except
  for a small percentage) in assisted living.” (Attention financial
  services companies, and long term insurance providers)
• Getting sick and needing extensive (and expensive) rehab and care
  giving services, yet not having adequate health insurance. (Attention
  health care insurers, guardians of Medicare, gyms, food manufacturers,
  physical therapists.)
• Not having adequate health insurance.
  (Attention employers.) Older workers want and need to continue working
  for health insurance and because they need the money. Others want to
  continue working for the intellectual challenges and camaraderie.
  Advice to employers: don’t be scared off by ageism; recent research
  shows that older workers can learn new technologies and are less absent
  than younger employees.

Optimism

And
yet despite these looming fears, Boomers are inherently optimists,
understanding that Americans have the power to change what is and
create new possibilities. The oldest of the boomers, who will begin
turning 65 in 2011, were raised on John F. Kennedy's 1961 call to
action. It’s a generation of activists who know how to organize and
lobby.

A recent study released by the Harvard School of Public
Health says Boomers can become an unprecedented resource if they are
mobilized across the nation as community volunteers.

''There's a
major opportunity on the near horizon to recruit large numbers of older
boomers to help strengthen community life in America,'' says Jay
Winsten of the Harvard School of Public Health. Winsten is director of
the Harvard-MetLife Foundation Initiative on Retirement and Civic
Engagement. But he says non-profit organizations that could use those
volunteers need to create meaningful jobs for them. Boomers, he says,
won't be satisfied stuffing envelopes. ''Boomers have expectations as
to the kind of useful roles they can play in helping organizations.''

If your company is looking at growth market, think Boomers. And think UFO marketing messages.

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