Maureen Rogers over at The Opinionated Marketers notes with amusement a conference focused on “Marketing to Men, Women and Boomers.” First reaction to the conference theme: people over 50 are. . .neither? Second (more serious) reaction: anything that gets ad agencies to pay more attention to Boomers is good–so, segment away if you like. Speakers at the Nov. 12-13 event in New York City include PrimeTime Women author Marti Barletta and marketing uber-guru Seth Godin. He’s scheduled to speak on the Boomer track at this event, and has posted on mistakes marketers make when they ignore older consumers:

For a long time, the easy way out was to believe that 18 to 34 year olds were open and seniors were closed. Web surfers are open, National Enquirer readers are closed. etc. etc. Then the baby boom happened. Baby boomers have been open their whole lives. And now they are seniors. So all the conventional wisdom goes out the window. Senior travel, senior fashion, senior experiences… it’s all fair game, because there’s a different demographic inhabiting that age group now.

I’d just add that not all Boomers are seniors. . . today. There are clear lifestage differences between these two groups that will persist another 10 to 15 years. One small example: how Boomers use the Internet compared with seniors.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 24th, 2007 at 9:17 am and is filed under Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.