Driving past bias
Behind much of the ad industry aversion to marketing to people 50 and up is simple bias, Boomager’s Hubbell said. He recalled his experience moderating a panel at an auto show for the luxury sector, which focused on the reality that millennials and younger rarely have the money to buy expensive cars, and many have eschewed car ownership entirely in favor of public transit and Uber.
Even so, automotive marketers often target younger consumers anyway to make their customer bases younger and chase longer customer lifetime value, Hubbell said.
So he called on one of the younger members of a panel to ask if she had to choose between marketing to a boomer or a millennial. And she said: “I would pick the millennial because I don’t want to sell a baby boomer their last car,” Hubbell recalled.
That doesn’t represent the view of all automotive marketers, especially since the median age of new car buyers is 53. Speaking at the ANA Media Conference, Trisha Ripperger, CMO of the Tom Wood Group, a Midwest dealer group, noted that the company’s target is people 45 and up. So the dealership group focuses on local TV, though Ripperger said she sets aside 10% of the budget for connected TV, largely to reach younger buyers with an eye toward long-term brand building.
Reluctance to target older consumers “gets back to that bias that’s never going to go away,” Hubbell said, some of it driven by the belief that older consumers are set in their ways and hard to convince to buy new products or switch brands.
There is some truth to that seen in a CivicScience survey on brand switching. The survey of 1,699 adults found those 55 and up were the least likely of any group to say they’re open to switching. Even so, 27% described themselves as very open to switching, 60% as somewhat open and 13% as not open at all. That compared to 37% of people under 25 who are very open to switching, 50% who are somewhat open and 14% who are not open at all.
CivicScience also found that older consumers are a potentially more lucrative market because they’re more likely to buy national brands rather than store brands. People 55 and older were least likely of any age group to say they buy Walmart private-label brands. But, perhaps in a sign of being open to switching, they were also the most most likely age group to report they’ve been buying store brands more often recently.
“We’re seeing the opposite” of the set-in-their-ways paradigm, said Five0's Martin. “There's a big openness to new products and services.”
One of the drivers of that is research that tracks people's relative happiness through their lives, he said. People under 50 tend to be weighed down by child rearing and other responsibilities, and happiness tends to rebound starting at 50, Martin said.
“Children are out of the house. School is paid off. Your house is paid off. Suddenly you're an empty nester, and your happiness is increasing,” Martin said. “You’re enjoying life more, and you’re spending because you have the resources."