While marketing experts agree that the lines between the generations are becoming ever more blurred, there are, of course, meaningful differences, as well. Baby Boomers continue to be in the center of every marketer’s sweet spot, due primarily to their sheer numbers. Over the next five years, the over-50 population will grow at six times the rate as the under-30 population. Ten thousand people turn 50 every day in America.
Put simply, the product that wows the Baby Boomers wins. “It’s about the numbers,” says David Page, co-founder of Agency Five 0. “The wealthiest group of people in the country will live longer than any group prior to them. One way or another, they will get us out of the recession.”
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That means not using a 22-year-old model to sell an antiaging cream. “The biggest shift has been from the promise of looking younger to the promise of looking your best,” says Page. “There’s a real misunderstanding that women in their 50s want to look 30. Look at Jamie Lee Curtis letting her hair go gray—even a few years ago, that was unthinkable.”
To a Baby Boomer, health and well-being are a necessity, not a trend. “Boomers will invest time and money and energy in staying healthy longer, and that dovetails with the message of ‘I can help you look and feel healthy longer,’” says Timothy Ressmeyer of Information Resources Inc.
Despite the immense size and spending power of Baby Boomers (close to $2 trillion annually), marketers are still struggling to find their voice with this group. “To a person over 50, those Viagra ads were the silliest things in the world,” says Page, referring to ads that show stately, silver-haired couples of a certain age gazing tenderly into each other’s eyes with not a frisson of sexual tension between them. “They were clearly done by people who didn’t want to admit that their parents were having sex.”
Compared with the 80 million Boomers and 76 million Millennials, Generation X—anyone born from 1965 to 1977—is a paltry 40 million. “They have middle-child syndrome,” says Melissa Lavigne of the Intelligence Group. “Generation X feels skipped over because we were never marketed to.” That’s not necessarily a bad thing. This is also the age known as the “Sweet Spot”—when dating anyone from 25 to 45 is acceptable and when you’re most likely to have financial freedom without the fiscal burden of a family. “It’s the aspirational generation,” says Jonah Disend of Redscout. “Their beauty and experience match.”
Generation Y, also called the Millennials, is defined as anyone born from 1987 to 1995. “Millennials are coming of age in this recession,” says Ressmeyer. “Just a few years ago, they were more impulsive, and now they’re becoming very smart, very savvy shoppers.”
The recession has made them cautious and the expanse of media has made them thorough. In the past, this age group was predictably spontaneous. Now they find a product that piques their interest, and they “look it up online, read reviews, check the blogs, do their due diligence,” says Ressmeyer. “This is the first generation wired to use social networks to make smart purchase decisions.”
As informed as they are, the young generation is still, well, young. “They have a general attitude that whatever problems arise today will have a cure when they age,” says Lavigne. “They know how to avoid skin cancer better than anyone before them, but they also think they’ll be able to fix their sunspots with an iPhone app.”