Crafting a successful marketing campaign targeted at Baby Boomers requires a re-imagined approach to better understand the personal desires and circumstances of this consumer demographic, according to one marketing expert on Boomers and older adults.
Baby Boomers are growing increasingly more diversified as they age, and this is making them much tougher to reach through ordinary 21st Century advertising tactics, according to Jim Gilmartin, principal of Coming of Age Leadership, a full-service marketing agency focused on advertising to Boomers and senior customers.
In a recent blog post, Gilmartin writes that as Boomers move from the “crowd-thinking of their youth to personal uniqueness in their older years,” marketers should tailor their messaging to reflect a conditional tone, as doing so allows each individual viewer to interpret the message based upon their own needs and desires.
“It stands beyond any need to defend the proposition that marketing success rises or falls according to the marketer’s understanding of the Boomer’s worldview, values and aspirations,” Gilmartin writes. “However this basic need of marketing cannot be satisfied by asking Boomers about such issues. Few people know themselves well enough to give a marketer the answer he or she wants.”
To effectively communicate messages with older consumers, Gilmartin suggests marketers pattern their approach similar to how the human brain works, particularly how messages are interpreted and received in the right and left portions of the brain.
In past posts, Gilmartin has discussed the differences between the left and right brain and how each section processes information differently. For example, he notes the brain’s right side cannot processes abstractions such as words and numbers; they must be converted to sensory images first.
When such information is presented to the brain “affect-free,” or “emotionally neutral,” Gilmartin says the brain has to work harder to process the information than if the info was already reduced to sensory images.
“By using images and storytelling techniques your message becomes more vivid, engaging, memorable and compelling,” Gilmartin writes. “[N]o matter the quality of discovery, research and analysis, and the integration of quantitative and qualitative input, a marketing campaign’s outcome ultimately depends on the character and quality of communications with consumers.”
Read more at Coming of Age.
Written by Jason Oliva
