It’s common knowledge among marketers that marketing to seniors is largely a waste of time. All you need to do is look at the ads in Modern Maturity magazine compared to, say, Rolling Stone, to see what marketers believe.
The reason most believe this is because of a simple distinction: open and closed.
Open people are seeking out things that they believe will make their lives better. Experiences and products and styles that will open doors, cause growth, save time and money and increase status. All of these things are ‘go up’ events. Find people who are open and you find people you can talk to.
Closed people are trying to maintain the status quo. They are very focused on keeping things from getting worse, but they’re not particularly concerned about joining the in crowd or starting something.
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.
Psychographics (open vs. closed) are way more important than demographics.
April 12, 2007
A few months ago, I heard an interview with one of the leading metal baseball bat manufacturers. They were lobbying hard against regulations that would require little league players to use wood bats.
Today, Chris point us to this story about emissions. The car makers continue to lobby hard, or even sue, over emission rules. Wendy’s, as previously discussed, is working hard against a rule in New York requiring they post calorie counts. It’s common wisdom that government regulation is bad for business, and especially bad is regulation that requires change.
I don’t get it.
A few years ago, the FTC changed the law about how wide apart the bars in cribs for children had to be. Wide spaces between bars end up strangling kids and breaking arms. The law only applied to home cribs, which meant that hospital cribs weren’t covered. Hard Manufacturing, my favorite hospital crib company, took the regulation to heart and alerted every hospital in the country that the cribs they were using weren’t deemed safe for home use… so why use them in a hospital? What do you think happened to crib sales? It was a huge few years as the cribs were replaced (and the kids ended up safer).
Wendy’s did the best when they were growing with the launch of salads. Not when they were copying McDonald’s over burgers. Change is their friend.
If I were a leading bat company, I’d formulate a ‘slower’ metal bat that would be just as safe as wood… and unbreakable too. What a marketing coup! Then I’d lobby like crazy for change.
If I were Ford Motor, I’d lobby as hard as possible for the strictest emissions regime in the world. If you’re losing the game, change the rules. Start over. Be the only major car company to produce 100% zpev or hybrid cars.
Business as usual is almost always lousy marketing, because there isn’t a lot of room for growth. The opportunities kick in when an external force requires a brand new story, when consumers are choosing to pay attention because they’ve got no other choice.
It’s easy to argue against change. It disheartens shareholders and even employees. But external change is the most likely lever of growth, because it puts you back on the agenda of attention.
Ken sends us to this video.
There are more honor students (top quartile) currently in school in China than there are students (total) in the US. If you’re ‘one in a million’ in China, then there are a thousand other people just like you.
Best in the World gets more challenging all the time.
April 11, 2007
Last weekend, I saw The Hoax, with Richard Gere. It’s a fantastic movie, one of the best I’ve seen in a while. As soon as it ended, I had a compulsion to tell you about it. So I sat down and had a long talk with myself about why.
Why was it so important to me to tell other people? It’s not a movie that will make the world a better place. It won’t increase my reputation or give me a sense of power to be able to tell people about it. So why?
I don’t know. It’s just a really good movie.
Sometimes, we worry so much about tracking and selfish actions and mechanics that we ignore the biggest factor: people like to talk about stuff.
Which leads to this terrific commentary about the #1 song in America. Irony alert: it’s tongue in cheek. My guess is that listeners on the radio today didn’t get it. I’m glad to say I did.
Often, something is popular just because it’s popular.
Chris points us to this "auction." Like the Chicago Cubs play baseball…
[update: removed by eBay. Sorry.]
That’s the killer clause.
"We did everything within reason and we still lost."
Your competition beats you when they do things that are unreasonable. In large markets, the unreasonable competitor always establishes the new benchmark, always ends up as best in the world, always redefines what ‘within reason’ means.
I guess the only choice is to be unreasonable.
April 10, 2007
Send this post to your tech team. Tell them to find and destroy any error messages that might be shown to a user that bear any resemblance to this one from the NY EZ Pass site.
Take the rest of the day off. Nice work!
Seven Reasons You Might Fail to Become the Best in the World
- You run out of time (and quit).
- You run out of money (and quit).
- You get scared (and quit).
- You’re not serious about it (and quit).
- You lose interest or enthusiasm or settle for being mediocre (and quit).
- You focus on the short term instead of the long (and quit when the short term gets too hard).
- You pick the wrong thing at which to be the best in the world (because you don’t have the talent).
By “you,” I mean your team, your company, or just plain you, the jobseeker, employee, or entrepreneur. The important thing to remember about these seven things is that you can plan for them. You can know before you start whether or not you have the resources and the will to get to the end. Most of the time, if you fail to become the best in the world, it’s either because you planned wrong or because you gave up before you reached your goal.
Even worse than quitting in the first six cases: not quitting. Settling. Sticking with it but not succeeding.
Is it possible that you’re just not good enough? That you (or your team) just don’t have enough talent to be the best in the world? Sure, it’s possible. In fact, if your chosen area is the cello, or speed skating, then I might even say it’s probable. But in just about every relevant area I can think of, no, it’s not likely. You are good enough. The question is, will you take the shortcut you need to get really good at this?
Zaki points us to the phenomenon of the Dabbawalla. These men deliver thousands of lunches every single day in Mumbai… from the person’s home to their office, hot and fresh.
The reported error rate is one in six million.
How is this possible? How do you create and run a service with thousand of employees, no technology and a poorly-educated workforce and have better than six sigma quality?
Simple: the dabbawallas know their customers. If they rotated the people around, it would never work. There’s trust, and along with the trust is responsibility. By creating a flat organization and building relationships, the system even survives monsoon season.
That’s what florist David says is the value of marketing to recipients of flowers. Zero. Useless.
What a great way to get a post out of me!
You can market by telling or you can market by showing. There’s no doubt that interactive marketing, marketing where you actually deliver something of value, is far far more powerful than telling. Telling is just bragging. Telling is ignored. Showing, on the other hand, is about me. Me, me, me! It’s about providing an interactive experience that touches me.
What a great opportunity to do just that. I might be crazy, but my guess is that people who get flowers are also people who give flowers. And my guess is that giving someone an extraordinary experience when they get the flowers is the best way in the world to turn that person into a sender, too.
[Visitors to the office building where you are the landlord are more likely to rent space in an office building. People going to a funeral are more likely to be buying a plot or a service soon. Guests in a restaurant are more likely to be hosts at a restaurant. You get the idea.]
After I tracked down the local florist, I pointed out the condition of the flowers (that’s a genuine, unretouched photo). The florist said, "Oh, those stems are very soft. They’re supposed to be that way."
Useless marketing, indeed.
April 9, 2007
