Extract from the article

The most common argument why marketers, especially of the youthful variety, should pay more attention to their parents and grandparents generation is their huge spending power.

Within the first couple of sentences of an article you will see a quote along the lines of "they (the over 50s) own 80 per cent of the UK's wealth, worth more than £280 billion". This "scare them by the numbers" tactic is at best useless, at worse counterproductive.

When younger marketers see these statistics they filter them out and pigeonhole the article as yet another one banging on about old people.

Cigarette packets in the UK contain a health warning that covers 30% of the front and 40% of the back and reads 'smoking kills', or 'smokers die younger', or more clinically 'smoking clogs the arteries and causes heart attacks and strokes'. What result have these dire warnings had on young people? In 2002 more 20-24 year olds smoke than did in 1988. It is a mystery why a group of consumers, that receives so little marketing attention, has been dissected into so many weird sounding segments.

If you can't change a 24 year old's behaviour by telling them they are killing themselves what chance do you stand of convincing them with a litany of quotes containing Billions of pounds and percentages of wealth? This technique is not going to generate the equivalent of a "big bang" when young marketers suddenly see the light and say "how stupid of us we have been ignoring the wealthiest group of consumer for the last decade".

The next thing you read about is how it is possible to divide older people, who are an incredibly diverse bunch, into strange tribal groups. They are given names, often accompanied by pictures, like the sophisticated 'Astute Cosmopolitans', the boring 'Thrifty Traditionalists' and the scary 'Temperate Xenophobes'. It is a mystery why a group of consumers, that receives so little marketing attention, has been dissected into so many weird sounding segments. I have counted 150 of them and more appear every week.

Here is one explanation for this obsession with pigeonholing older people into lifestyle and behavioural groups: if you are a research, advertising or media agency looking for press coverage the simplest way is to present research findings that unlocks the mystery of the over 50s by revealing some mystical new segmentation. I have never understood what marketers should do with the knowledge that there are X% more 'poor apathetic couch potatoes' than 'rich consumerist junkies' and that 'techno phobic stick in the muds' enjoy EastEnders more than Panorama, but it makes good press copy.