Why Expertise is Not Enough to Succeed with Older Consumers
Why Expertise is Not Enough to Succeed with Older Consumers
The more important word in the concept of “thought leader” is leader.
Demonstrating your expertise is a powerful way to succeed with digital marketing. And that’s especially true as you venture into the longevity economy.
Sharing valuable content that addresses a prospect’s problem can earn you followers and fans thanks to powerful influence principles like authority, liking, and social proof. And if you have followers, that makes you a leader.
That’s the more important word in the concept of “thought leader” – leader. The key to being seen as a leader has more to do with a shared identity with the people you’re looking to help than it does with your credentials or actual level of expertise.
That brings us to the concept of “leading expert,” which typically refers to the person with the best credentials. In this case, however, the emphasis is on being the “leading” expert – a person who is fighting against the status quo as part of a movement with business implications.
Jerod and I take you on a deeper dive on this week’s podcast. It’s highly relevant to marketers and entrepreneurs thinking of staking a claim in the longevity economy, but it’s also a concept that works for marketing anything to anyone.
Listen here:
Older People Want Empowerment
We have yet another insightful article from the New York Times this week, and they seem highly determined to raise awareness about the issues surrounding the longevity economy and the shift to an older society.
The Census Bureau predicts that by 2034, there will be more people in the United States age 65 or older than under 18, for the first time in history.
This is a worldwide phenomenon, and other countries are already leaving the U.S. behind at the governing level:
Peer nations have already taken steps to center health span in their policies. Singapore, with a longer average life span and an even more rapidly aging society than the United States, committed in its national health reforms last year “to prevent or delay the onset of ill health.” Britain has set an explicit goal of increasing healthy life expectancy by five years by 2035. And in Japan, local programs already invest in initiatives to help older adults share their skills and wisdom across generations, such as teaching youths how to cook, make art and garden, with benefits for young and old alike.
Healthspan is everything, because it’s health that allows us to live vibrant, active lives for longer. To work longer, thrive longer, love longer.
And this is why empowerment is the key concept when it comes to marketing to older people. If we can’t get past our own government gridlock, we’ll have to allow marketers to undo the damage done with the creation of youth culture back when the Baby Boomers were young.
Forget About Living to 100. Let’s Live Healthier Instead
From Anti-Aging to Pro-Aging
Marketing is about messages, made up of words. And so many of the words we’ve used related to older people are problematic. You generally don’t want to insult your prospects, right? But it happens all the time with older consumers.
So we might applaud the beauty industry for ditching the term “anti-aging” in favor of “pro-aging.” But has anything other than the word changed?
As society grapples with ageist attitudes and the consequences of them, the beauty industry has been confronting its role in demonizing the effects of aging. In 2017, Allure resolved to stop using the term “anti-aging.” Many brands have shifted away from “anti-aging,” too, in favor of terms meant to celebrate aging.
But Business of Fashion beauty editor-at-large Rachel Strugatz isn’t buying them. In a piece last month, she wrote, “Media and brands put a positive spin on getting older with terms like ‘pro-aging’ and ‘anti-anti-aging.’ Except nothing really changed.”
This article's author goes on to ask 21 beauty industry entrepreneurs a couple of questions:
Has the beauty industry made progress against ageism?
What should beauty brands do going forward to address their contributions to the ageism scourge?
Very insightful to read through the answers. Especially since some of the entrepreneurs are in their 50s and 60s themselves.
Beauty Brands Are Using The Term “Pro-Aging,” But Is The Industry Making Strides Against Ageism?
Keep it 120
So yes, we should focus on healthy life expectancy (healthspan) more than raw life expectancy. But as the meme says, why not both?
From The Economist:
Living to 100 today is not unheard of, but is still rare. In America and Britain centenarians make up around 0.03% of the population. Should the latest efforts to prolong life reach their potential, living to see your 100th birthday could become the norm; making it to 120 could become a perfectly reasonable aspiration.
More exciting still, those extra years would be healthy. What progress has been made in expanding lifespans has so far come by countering the causes of death, especially infectious disease. The process of ageing itself, with its attendant ills such as dementia, has not yet been slowed. This time, that is the intention.
The fact of many people living much longer would have wide ramifications. Most obviously, working lives will be extended, as they have already as life expectancies have lengthened, and possibly even more so for women, who will lose less of their careers to having children, perhaps narrowing inequality in the workplace.
The key sentence in that last paragraph says that age reversal treatments would extend the length of our working lives, but acknowledges that it’s already happening regardless. Radical life extension just puts the longevity economy on steroids.
We’ve covered this topic before when exploring the science-fiction reality of medical age reversal. The Economist doing an entire series of articles on the topic brings a bit of rarefied credibility to fantastical medical advances.
Slowing Human Aging is Now the Subject of Serious Research
Keep going-
Brian
P.S. Lock in the low introductory rate for Longevity Gains Premium before prices increase this Friday. You’re going to like what you get … I guarantee it. 😄