The 50-plus, sex and genes - recipe for making money

ITV lost £150 million on its acquisition of Friends Reunited business when it sold it to a company called DC Thomson.

It was clear from start that ITV didn’t have the faintest idea what to do with the company, but I guess its seemed like a good idea at the time to buy what was then highly a successful site, enabling people to search for their school and college friends.

Having been on the site either and either made yourself feel smug about the boring life of classmates or depressed when see how well they are doing, there wasn't much more to do.

Lately, the company alighted upon the two aspects of human nature that maintain a long lasting interest – the "where did I come from" question and sex. By then it was too late and Friends Reunited was pigeon holed as a good idea at the time that never reached escape velocity to become self sustaining. Think of any of today’s social networking sites that might be going the same way?

Anyway DC Thomson, a company I had never heard of purchased the outfit for £25 million.

Why?

The headline in the Guardian answers the question: “New Friends Reunited owner plans over-50s dating website.”

Looks to me like a smart move. Thomson buys a genealogy business (it already has about 50% of the UK market in this field) that it can merge with its own and then provides dating services to the community of people that are desperate to know where their great, great grand mum was born. Brilliant.

The lessons for marketers. One, don’t acquire a company that you don’t understand and have only the most vague ideas how to grow. Two, sex and the need to know “where we came from” are fundamental drivers that can produce a commercial return. Dick Stroud

Brand storytelling and Google analytics

A while back I wrote about an excellent paper by Nicholine Hayward on the dusty old subject of Strategic Planning.

Nichole has just released a new paper about Brand Storytelling (Motive, Means and Opportunity) that shows how the most exciting and effective stories always benefit the consumer as much as the brand.

Much of the paper is about McDonalds and with the help of Google keywords and other tools she show how by getting down to the detail of the company’s Web traffic it is possible to improve the brand dialogue between it and its customers a vice versa.

It really is a great paper and beautifully written and whilst not directly about the 50-plus it contains ideas and techniques that apply to all age groups. Dick Stroud

Words of wisdom from Tom Peters

I supposed like all gurus, Tom Peters pronouncements have a familiar ring about them - like maybe he has said the same things before?

In this article in revisits a few of his favourite themes. The fact that they are familiar doesn’t make them any less important.

His main thoughts are:

Women aren’t a market segment; they are the market. Marketers should have a men’s initiative for the residual male.

If you want to effectively exploit the women’s market, then the majority of your executive team (and I’m talking about a 20-person business, as well as a 2,000-person business) had better be women.

The “squint test.” If I’m looking at the executive committee or board, I should be able to squint and it oughta-sorta look like the market.

The other giant market that is underserved is made up of baby boomers and what I call “geezers,” who are just older than boomers born between 1946 and 1964.

By marrying the boomer-geezer idea to the women idea you get - Bingo!

Read this article for more of the great man’s ideas. Dick Stroud

Join the Futurelab LiveBlog on Tuesday December 9th

For a couple of years Futurelab has published a selection of my muses about the 50-plus market. To celebrate a 1000 days of the blog’s existence – that makes it almost a geriatric – it is running a LiveBlog in which some of its contributors give their views on the realities of marketing, strategy, innovation and design.

So not only can you read my stuff on this blog but you can also see it being developed in real time on the FutureLab blog. I have no idea how this is going to work but it should be great fun to witness.

If you want to join the conversation, you can participate from 12:00 until 21:00 Central European time on http://liveblog.futurelab.net/. If you go to this site you can even set a reminder. Dick Stroud

Edelman - where have you been for the past 5 years?

There is an article in advertising Age called the:” The Misunderstood Generation”. I can never work out if AdAge is on subscription or not. Anyway here is the gist of the thing.

Edleman has conducted a survey of 1,320 baby boomers and produced a report that has come to some astonishingly naïve and simplistic conclusions. Conclusions like: “marketers over generalize, misrepresent and sometimes ignore the generation (boomers) lumping them together and, in the process, alienating them.

"We really set out to blow up some myths," said the exec VP-general manager of Edelman's Boomer Insights Generation Group. "The longer that marketers keep treating boomers as a huge mass as opposed to individuals, the longer it's going to take them to enter the market."

Give me strength. This is 101 marketing. I cannot believe this has come as a shock to Edleman and its clients. Have these guys been in a coma for the last 5 years?

There are other banal statements like. "It would behoove marketers to consider that boomers are not a widespread demographic," said senior VP-strategic counsel at Edelman. "Baby boomers have always been considered the 'me-generation,' and that doesn't change with age. We're still just as self-centered and we want things very customized."

And so the article goes on.

Am I being over-critical? How can a company like Edleman think it is worthy of coming out with this simplistic stuff.

If any Edleman clients are reading this blog and want to jump from page 1 of Boomer Marketing to page 200 then give me a call.

The second interesting (and connected) news item is from Wharton Business School. The question that the learned professors attempt to answer is why, when it is obvious to everybody else, are so many marketers still playing at the periphery of digital advertising?

These are some of the reasons identified:

Some of the lag is due to advertisers' long-term relationships with ad agencies, which focus on creative, brand-building messages, and with traditional media companies.

In many cases, institutionalized cultures, agency relationships and media relationships are still limiting them.

Part of the lag in moving advertising is generational (i.e. the older marketing decision makers still don’t “get it” about the Internet)

The status reasons of still giving staff focused on branding and creative work more status than those assigned to customer-centric, data-based work – who are still often viewed as analytical geeks.

I believe the reasons for the lack of responsiveness to change to digital are similar to those for ignoring oldies. Wharton says it very politely. I would phrase it more directly.

This is a massive generalisation, what the hell, but many marketers are conservative – risk averse – lacking in analytical skills - unimaginative and wedded to operating in their comfort zone – even when the facts point to this being dopy. Dick Stroud

Why do marketers ignore the 50-plus?

This is a question I often get asked. Of course not all of them do but there are still too many around who do. People invariably think it is some complex marketing reason or because of pro-youh prejudice or because they are young themselves. When I tell them my answer they always shrug and say: “No.. can’t be..it must be more complicated than that”.

My answer is the marketers are a conservative bunch (especially of the B2C variety). They hate getting outside their confidence zone and find it much easier to just keep doing what they did yesterday. Also, there is always a bigger issue that must be sorted today rather than think about how the ageing population affects them tomorrow.

My thoughts have received a bit of support from an outfit called the Fournaise Marketing Group that calls itself: "one of the world's leading marketing effectiveness tracking companies”.

In its Global Marketing Effectiveness Report (surveyed 3,000 marketing professionals across the globe) it comes up with a couple of profound claims.

Firstly, 65% of all marketing B2C spend in 2007 had no effect on consumers. 70% of marketers believe that short-term revenue-boosting and lead-generation campaigns are more important than long-term intangible brand building. Overall, most companies don’t have much of a clue about the effectiveness of their marketing.

OK, you might say – so what’s new? Nothing much, but it does help explain one of marketing’s most interesting paradoxes. Dick Stroud

Mimetic isomorphism

What a fantastic term. If you read this blog you are going to see it used a lot more during 2008.

This is time of year, for me at least, when I can make a start to read that huge pile of articles/reports/snippets that I have accumulated during the year - feel impelled to keep - but have not had the time to read.

I have made a start and read: “Lessons of the Last Bubble”. This is published (free) on the Strategy+Business site and is by Tim Laseter, David Kirsch, and Brent Goldfarb. It should be mandatory reading for everybody who has a sure fire winning business idea.

The article debunks many of the myths that have grown-up about the dot.com bubble. Perhaps the worst excess of that period was the dose of economic idiocy that gripped great sways of the technology/finance industry. I would say the herd mentality – the authors call it mimetic isomorphism. Why does the social networking application keep coming into my mind?

The other topic addressed in the article is the way that when a theory (scientific or business) becomes accepted as the norm, we spend more time looking for evidence to justify its position rather than trying to reject or refine its substance. The article quotes Karl Popper, the leading scientific philosopher of the 20th century who argued for challenging conventional wisdom: “By criticizing our theories, we can let our theories die in our stead.” Popper also noted that “no matter how many instances of white swans we may have observed, this does not justify the conclusion that all swans are white.” Why do the words environmentalism and globalisation keep coming into my mind?

What the hell has this got to do with the 50-plus? Lots. Our obsession with distilling the complex issue of 50-plus marketing into a set of simple ‘guidelines’ is one example. I will point out a few more ways during 2008. Dick Stroud

Trendwatching - why and how

Trendwatching.com distributes a monthly briefing that is always worth reading. Sometimes the trends it talks about seem a zillion miles away from the 50-plus market sometimes I can see the relevance. Always the trends make you think.

This month’s briefing is about the process of trendwatching. Why and how to do it. This is straightforward pragmatic advice. Well worth reading. Dick Stroud

BrandChannel.com are featuring Boomers

BrandChannel decided it was about time it did a feature on Boomers. If you know anything about the Boomer / 50-plus market you aren’t likely to learn very much. Lots of broad sweeping statements and the usual splattering of Boomer facts and examples.
Home: They're getting older, but the Baby Boomers remain a booming market.
Features Profile: Can Ameriprise grab the older Boomer market from older financial services brands?
Papers: Can your brand attract the wired Baby Boomer?
Brandcameo: Brands rise in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.

Mary Furlong’s paper about the ‘wired’ Baby Boomer is worth a read although I was surprised how little mention it made about Web video. I have seen estimates suggesting that video will take 98% of all Internet bandwidth in the next 24 months so it is something you cannot ignore. I think it will be the biggest revolution to hit the web in a decade and will especially change the way companies communicate with older audiences.

But I am not complaining. Anything that is likely to dent the prejudices of the marketing world to take more account of the older consumers has to be a good thing. Dick Stroud

P&G's acquisition of MDVIP - interesting idea

P&G recently announced acquisition of a stake in MDVIP, in which physicians keep practices small and focus on preventive care for fee-paying patients

Coca-Cola Co. this month bought Fuze Beverage, extending the beverage maker's line of drinks with Fuze juice and tea brands.

Johnson & Johnson Co. has also been active, obtaining cardiac stent maker Conor Medsystems and the consumer health products business of Pfizer Inc. in recent months.

P&G's chief executive explained the rationale for this purchase as giving his company "the time to learn; it gets us in early in the formation of the new category or segment."

At the heart of this interest in health related products and services is simple demographics and economics. More old, more healthcare spend. Simple as that.

MDVIP's founder said that he sees the P&G investment as a catalyst to keep building his business: "We think they are bringing a world of knowledge to us... they are masters of scaling and branding." The trick is applying all this global marketing power and not suffocating the entrepreneurial spirit that created the company in the first place. Dick Stroud

Costly, confused, in crisis

An £8 million pound launch could not hide the dichotomy of purpose that has marred Heyday’s fortunes. Headline from Marketing magazine.

Since its launch I have been commenting about Heyday – Age Concern’s 'young-old' brand. This week Marketing had a full page article about the problems and why they occurred. Not a happy story. This is a scanned PDF of the article - not the best of quality. Dick Stroud.