Marketers Too Focused On Youngsters

Men 50 to 54 have the greatest spending power of any demographic group in America today, a new study finds.

But society’s obsession with youth is blinding business to a golden marketing opportunity.

“Advertisers and communicators really don’t get it,” says Sandra Timmermann, who heads up research for the MetLife Mature Market Institute. “What people have been talking about all these years - the mature market phenomenon - is upon us.”

The study also confirms other recent reports to the effect that the baby boomer generation has no intention of retiring early - if ever.

“While those in their early 50s will have relatively high incomes,” says Timmermann, the institute’s director, “most won’t retire until they are forced to do so.”

In the first half of their 50s, American men earn an average of $52,738 a year, the institute reports. That is fully one-fourth more than all men working full time.

Women currently reach their earning peak at age 45 to 49. But as baby boomer women with longer work histories enter their 50s, the pattern of peak earnings may change and more closely resemble that for men, the data suggests.

“These figures should be especially significant to businesses and marketers as they look to the future,” says Timmermann, “since those 50-to-54 not only have the highest discretionary income, but also are among the nation’s fastest growing groups.

Americans in their 50s will number 30.5 million in the year 2000. By 2015, the 50s population will reach 42.8 million. “That is an extraordinary amount of collective buying power!” says Timmermann.

“Over the next 15 years, businesses that have the foresight will redesign products and services and adapt their marketing strategies to Americans in their early 50s,” says Timmermann. “Those who do not will miss out.”

Why then are advertisers and marketers still so fixated on youth, where the numbers and the dollars are dwindling?

“Old habits are hard to break,” says Bob Blancato, spokesman for the institute and former head of the White House Conference on Aging for President Clinton in 1995.

Blancato and Timmermann point out that advertising and communications decisions are being made today by younger and younger persons, who have never occupied these positions before. Naturally, the young decision-makers are more oriented toward serving the highly competitive market they know and identify with - in effect, themselves - than the underdeveloped and undefined more mature market.

Businesses likewise may be mismanaging the aging work force.

“Age discrimination is not about mandatory retirement at 65 anymore,” says Blancato. “We’re past that. Age discrimination today is about not keeping your older workers as trained, as current, as competitive, as active and involved in your company as your younger workers.

“In the next few years, as the full impact of the baby busters’ inability to replenish the work force becomes felt, those businesses that mismanaged their older workers will pay a penalty.

“Also within the next few years,” Blancato foresees, “as the issues that impact on older workers increasingly impinge on them, the leading edge of the baby boomers will become the advocates for older workers that they should have been all along.

“We at the MetLife Mature Market Institute and others can only keep presenting the numbers until finally people start to pay attention and take action,” said Blancato.

“Inevitably, the workplace will become an employee market for older boomers over the next 10 to 15 years.”

Timmermann says the message also is finally getting through to baby boomers that, whether or not they wish to continue working, most will have no choice but to work at least part time.

“Early retirement would reduce their pension benefits too much for the average baby boomer to make up the difference,” she says, “and they would outlive their financial resources.”