From Baby Boom to Longevity Boom
A marketing movement created youth culture. It will take another one for the longevity economy to fully thrive.
Back in the 1940s, Eugene Gilbert did something radical.
As a stocker for a shoe store in 1944, he convinced his boss to start advertising their sports shoes to teenage boys. Those shoes began flying off the shelves, which was a major revelation at the time.
Gilbert took things to the next level in 1945 when he founded Gil-Bert Teen Age Services, the first market research firm focused on teenagers. Gilbert not only talked to his subjects about how they felt and thought, but he also hired other teenagers to perform the interviews to get honest answers.
Meanwhile, Helen Valentine was also on a “radical” path. In 1944 she founded Seventeen magazine, dedicated exclusively to 13-to-19-year-old females. Readership exploded to over one million within a year, and advertisers were introduced to what would become a dominant marketing demographic.
Gilbert and Valentine are credited with being among the first to identify and prove that teenagers were a unique market segment distinctly different from children and adults. In the process, they created the youth market, which turned out to be incredibly powerful given the post-war baby boom.
Before this, adolescence was not regarded as a legitimate life stage, much less an influential market segment. There were children, and there were adults, and marketers thought in terms of either one or the other.
Thus began the long legacy of catering to Baby Boomers. Although youth is long gone for this generation, they’re not ready to cede the marketplace attention they’ve grown accustomed to.
In fact, they demand attention thanks to the remaining large size of the cohort and, more importantly, their vast wealth. And yet the marketplace, ironically, finds itself ill-equipped to respond.
They Didn’t Start the Fire …
Things escalated quickly once the fledgling youth culture kicked in. Radio amplified empowering messages aimed at teens, while the new medium of television brought images of young people into households – along with advertisements aimed at them.
While Baby Boomers are credited with the massive cultural shift that accelerated during the 1960s, it’s more accurate to say that they responded to empowering messages aimed at them created by their elders. Marketing and publishing pioneers like Gilbert and Valentine were soon joined by musicians, writers, filmmakers, and others whose target market was the young Baby Boom generation.
One prominent example is Chuck Berry. While Elvis later became the King, Berry is the Father of Rock and Roll. During a remarkable run of hits during the 1950s, he not only wrote songs for young people, he also wrote songs about them.
An article published in Billboard magazine offered this analysis of Berry’s influence:
Berry injected a cocksure ‘we know better than the adults’ attitude into rock—something his predecessors and peers hadn’t yet dared to do. That youth-privileging outlook was essential in transforming rock n’ roll from a musical fad into an irresistible attitude and lifestyle that infected teens and spread across America (also, it arguably paved the way for the massive generational divide of the ’60s).
Pro-youth and “anti-old” messaging accelerated from there. In 1964, 24-year-old activist Jack Weinberg (a member of the generation before the Boomers) proclaimed, “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” The following year, Roger Daltrey of The Who (also from the previous generation) sang, “I hope I die before I get old.”
Spoiler alert: he didn’t.
The point here is that the creation and amplification of youth culture also created much of the ageism, animosity, and indifference that characterizes the way older adults are viewed and treated today. And while that may strike some as just desserts for the Boomers who also didn’t die before they got old, that’s a highly unprofitable way to view things.
After being on the receiving end of perhaps the largest and most powerful example of empowerment marketing in history, most Baby Boomers are now faced with indifference and good old-fashioned inadequacy marketing. That’s both a marketplace failure and a huge opportunity.
In other words, older adults are treated as a problem to be solved, not wealthy consumers who want to get the most out of living life. Advertising aimed at older people tends to be “condescending at best, offensive at worst.”
Jeff Beer writing for Fast Company elaborates:
The world of oldsvertising is a hellscape full of reverse mortgages, erectile dysfunction pills, and bathtubs that won’t kill you.
I’m sure you’ve noticed the mainstream media obsession with Gen Z. Before that, it was all Millennials, all the time. That’s because of who pays the bills — advertisers.
This is an incredibly expensive mistake. Ageism hurts the bottom line of brands and the economy at large across the board:
Age discrimination against Americans age 50-plus cost the U.S. economy $850 billion in 2018. The Economic Impact of Age Discrimination [report] found that the potential economic contribution of the 50-plus age cohort could increase by $3.9 trillion in a no-age bias economy, which would mean a contribution of $30.7 trillion to GDP by 2050.
What’s needed is an all-new empowerment marketing campaign to change the discourse about older adults and our assumptions about them. The longevity economy is not merely about the large and growing number of older adults or their accumulated wealth.
It’s about older people spending more, for longer. This is the catalyst for a multi-trillion dollar opportunity waiting to be seized by those who understand the dynamic at play.
Increased Healthspan = Longer Spendspan
While the celebration of youth and vilification of the old is a big part of how we got here, it’s not the entire story. After all, when there’s money being spent, you’ll generally find companies that are after it.
Here we need to examine another 20th-century concept – retirement at age 65. Even as lifespans have increased dramatically since the passage of the Social Security Act in 1935, the idea remains that older people will voluntarily remove themselves from the world of work and normal commercial activity at a predetermined point.
Once retirees become fixed-income citizens, spending tends to decline. And the spending that does happen tends to go to specific industries, like travel and healthcare:
Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics suggests the decline is true. The mean spending for households headed by 55- to 64-year-olds was $65,000 in 2017, according to its Consumer Expenditure Survey. Spending dropped to $55,000 between ages 65 and 74, and after that it fell to $42,000. Housing costs remained steady and health care expenses increased, but nearly every other category — transportation, entertainment, clothing, food and drink — declined sharply.
So what’s changing? The longevity economy is not about helpless seniors adding a few extra years of decline at the end of life, but instead about older adults enjoying more healthy and productive years in an extended version of middle age.
A longer lifespan alone isn’t much to get excited about if you’re physically or mentally debilitated. People want to live long, healthy lives, and that means what matters is healthy life expectancy or healthspan.
This means an increasing number of people are effectively pushing the outer edge of what we’ve historically called “midlife” to around 75. That translates to a growing population of older people who continue to work and remain active consumers – while armed with larger disposable incomes.
Increased healthspan has already begun to spark change for Baby Boomers thanks to the “unretirement” movement, a phenomenon that started well before the pandemic and the current tight labor market. Despite being the generation in the best financial shape when it comes to retirement savings, many Boomers are coming back to work after retirement out of boredom and a lack of life purpose. Others are choosing not to retire in the first place, or leaving their jobs to start “second act” businesses.
For Generation X and Millennials, the choice not to retire may be more out of necessity, given low savings rates and the prospect of even longer lifespans. The surprising reality many fail to realize is that retirement isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Extended healthspan means people will work longer out of both necessity and desire and therefore spend at higher rates for longer.
All of this is true before taking into account advances in anti-aging and age-reversal science that could push “midlife” to 85, 95, and beyond. Billions of dollars are being poured into longevity and healthspan research, and the current indications say that the first person to live to 150 years has already been born.
Whether these age-reversal procedures arrive in time to meaningfully extend the lives of Baby Boomers remains to be seen. Generation X may well be the first generation to live much longer, and Millennials are almost assured to benefit from a host of developments that recently were strictly fodder for science fiction.
Before we arrive at true age-reversal procedures, though, seemingly daily developments promise to extend healthspan for all along the way. And news of these advancements encourages viable consumers to take care of themselves in order to live long enough to live much longer.
Change the World and Get Rich Trying
The Baby Boom generation was initially defined by movements and resistance against the status quo: civil rights, anti-war protests, second-wave feminism, environmentalism, and more.
But the important point is that the movement that defined and empowered the Baby Boomers in the first place was sparked by commercial interests. I would say that there were unintended consequences to this marketing-led movement, but unfortunately, the message-makers knew exactly what they were doing.
The reliable “us versus them” messaging celebrated the young and vilified the old. Now more than 60 years later, the Baby Boomers are front and center at the opposite end of their initial empowerment.
There’s already a growing movement to diminish the harmful effects of ageism, with calls for activism, commissions, and government policy shifts to advocate for an increasingly older population. I’d argue that it will once again be commercial interests that bring the most meaningful change in this arena.
Right or wrong, it’s money and the marketplace that can viably spark change given government gridlock. And while activism in favor of older adults is welcome, the root of the problem in this arena is largely an economic issue with a mismatch in supply and demand.
Now and into the coming years, we have a unique opportunity to create messages, products, and offers stoked by the fire of advocacy, empowerment, and social change. This is not marketing as usual, and that’s why there will be outsized wins for those who start now.
Our work over the last few years at Further on the consumer side has revealed a ton of actionable insights that I’ll share with you. Perhaps the most important thing I’ve learned is that almost all of our assumptions about older adults are incorrect to some degree, and even older people themselves suffer from ageist ideas that need refuting.
That’s what Longevity Gains is all about. The opportunity to both profit from and participate in the most significant demographic shift of the 21st century, the real consequences of which we can only begin to imagine.
Let’s keep going.
Love the side project here, Brian. :) Sure will be interesting to see how things shift as we all start living a lot longer than humans used to. First fleeting thought as I turned on the idea radar and pointed it towards the Boomer generation of my mom is some kind of training and/or app that would help Boomers like her (she's 73) keep from getting scammed by any number of smart and morally reprehensible scammers that target non-tech savvy people like my mom.
She and her friends so easily fall into their traps because they don't know what to look for. After many phone calls with me trying to help her learn the scammers tactics, however, she's getting more savvy.
Looking forward to seeing what you create here, and I hope all is well with you and the family. :)
Maybe a look into Germanys marketing might be interesting. I remember walking into a department store and being shocked that most of the floor was clothing for the over 40 crowd.