Why She Buys (16 page)

• Divorced women have special needs in certain categories
.

Among the industries most significantly affected are:

Financial services
. Banks and insurance companies have an opportunity to promote “divorce specialists” to help clients navigate the complex waters of planning for a future that was never anticipated.

Employment
. There’s also a tremendous opportunity to employ the legions of women who’ve retained primary custody of their children but can’t afford full-time child care. Call-center staffing companies and direct-selling firms such as Jafra, Arbonne, and Avon are great examples of companies that have capitalized on this labor force by enabling women to work from home. The airline Jet Blue, for example, has about 700 at-home reservation agents in Salt Lake City.

An easier way for kids to travel alone
. Heaven knows
the world needs more airline and airport services for children traveling alone to visit noncustodial parents. Attention to details such as family bathrooms and baby-changing stations inside men’s bathrooms is a huge help for when dads have custody.

GLOBAL TREND #5

The Presence of More Older Women Redefines Target Markets

Rosemarie Brennan is a popular figure in the real estate circles of Austin, Texas. She can be seen tooling around town in her shiny Lexus SUV, hammering For Sale signs in the front yards of houses all over the northwestern part of the city. When she’s not working, she’s out having lunch with her girlfriends, working out with her personal trainer, shopping at her favorite store, Stein Mart, and throwing dinner parties. She recently got back from a holiday adventure in Australia, where she spent three weeks touring the country. She’s contemplating joining a local singles group but isn’t sure if she can find the time. Besides, she’s not interested in getting married—though finding a travel or dinner companion might be nice. She attends adult-education classes at the University of Texas every Friday.

Rosemarie is a sixty-nine-year-old widow. In addition to being my mother, she is representative of the new breed of older woman: active, engaged in life, credit-card-wielding, and in charge of the household purse strings.

In America, marketers tend to put older people in a “ghetto”—in this case, an imaginary place where all people
over the age of forty-nine (the cutoff age for many advertising briefs) are frail, senile, set in their ways, waving their canes around at young people, and generally not worth targeting. This is an old model of thinking that urgently needs to be revised around the new reality of global aging.

In the United States, there are more baby boomer women (born between 1946 and 1964) than Generation X women (born between 1965 and 1980). This makes it astonishing that so many companies limit their target market to people ages eighteen to fifty-four. Our obsession with youth is blinding us. Aging is a consumer opportunity around the world, not just in Western countries. South Korea, Thailand, Taiwan, and Singapore will have an average population age of forty in 2050. Japan has the oldest population in the world. The impact that older people will have on society, lifestyles, retirement, housing, medicine, and consumer spending has only just begun.
²⁸
Since women live an average of five to ten years longer than men, you can guess who makes up the majority of older people.

Financially speaking, people over age fifty have the greatest assets and highest net worth of any group in the United States. It makes sense, since these people have spent a lifetime earning, investing, and accumulating money. According to the American Association of Retired People (AARP), individuals over fifty own 79 percent of all financial assets and control 80 percent of all the money in savings accounts, 62 percent of all large Wall Street investment accounts, and 66 percent of all dollars in the stock market.

Baby boomer women, who live longer than their husbands, stand to inherit money from both their parents and their spouses over the next twenty years. Looking at the aging population and the amount of money it controls—
even when recent stock market losses are factored in—a huge crop of new business opportunities reveals itself, especially when one considers that most boomers intend to keep working well into retirement age.
²⁹
When it comes to consumer spending, youth really is overrated.

By far the most consistently overlooked demographic anywhere, this group of women has more time, and in many cases a greater willingness to spend money on consumer products, than any other group in history. As a cohort that was catered to throughout their younger lives, some feel particularly disenchanted that marketers are so clearly ignoring them now. In business terms, of course, this is an opportunity.

In 2006, Unilever’s Dove brand turned stereotypes upside down through its advertising depictions of real women across the age and weight spectrum. This well-publicized breakthrough campaign was created after the company conducted a global study on aging and perceptions of beauty. The study found that 91 percent of women ages fifty to sixty-four felt that media and advertising need to do a better job of presenting realistic images of women over fifty. Nearly 60 percent of the women felt that if magazines were deemed reflective of a population, a reader could likely believe that women over fifty do not exist.
³⁰
When it comes to pop culture, many feel invisible.

These findings were of little surprise to women; the news value came from the fact that no major brand had ever discussed the issue so publicly before. As consumers, we’re so conditioned to looking at ads featuring nearly nude teenage models airbrushed to perfection that it’s easy to forget that almost nobody actually looks like that. Where, on the other hand, are all the people who are aging gracefully, such as actress Diane Keaton (born in 1946)? A look at any magazine
or television show is proof that such individuals are virtually nonexistent in the media, except in “silver fox” commercials for products such as adult diapers, vitamins, and Medicare supplements. Remember the old television ad “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up”? It was a pure distillation of the elderly stereotype, and it stuck like a piece of Velcro in people’s minds as the image of what it means to be old.

A major AARP study of women ages forty-five to ninety shows that they consider themselves to be happier now than they’ve ever been, thus debunking the myth that the second half of life is not as good as the first, particularly for women.
³¹
In many ways, women feel a sense of freedom as they get older—freedom from society’s expectations that they behave in a certain way, and freedom from the pressure to remain sexually attractive to young men. Older women don’t have to seek approval from others anymore. They’re free to be themselves, and that is one of the most liberating feelings anyone can have, no matter which gender.

From these data you can draw some insights for business:

• There’s a big difference between being youthful and being young
.

Older women feel good about themselves and aren’t trying to look like they’re twenty; in fact, most are relieved that they’re not.

No matter what the mirror tells them, many older people feel younger on the inside and want products that help them maintain that feeling. This attitude represents untapped opportunities for businesses, and not just the usual suspects in the cosmetics industry. How about “hip” underwear and other products that address the unsexy effects of aging, such as incontinence? At the time
of this writing, personal-products giant Kimberly-Clark has announced that it’s overhauling its Depend line of disposable underwear for men and women, in anticipation of an influx of aging Americans. For the first time in its twenty-five-year history, the Depend brand is featuring separate versions of absorbent underwear, with different leg openings and other changes, to fit men’s and women’s bodies.
³²

It’s just the tip of the iceberg. Where are the cool-looking technology products with bigger buttons, higher sound volumes, and larger fonts on LCD panels? Designer “orthopedic” shoes? (How long can Taryn Rose and Aerosoles be the only brands out there?) Where are the cool clothes for the aging woman? If you’re over the age of fifty, trying to find a pair of jeans isn’t easy. Take your mom out shopping one weekend to see what I mean. It’s brutal, and it doesn’t get any easier at ages sixty, seventy, or eighty.

Consider what a broadened definition of luxury could mean to this group of people, who still feel young and vital. Ironically, luxury is largely absent from the world of products for the over-fifty crowd, and yet this is the segment with money to spend.

From an advertising standpoint, the balance between youthful and realistic portrayals of people in this age group can be a tough call, because women of every age still like to see images that make them feel youthful and attractive. But remember, youthful isn’t the same thing as young. Women will respond positively to photographs of older women who look wonderful. Last year, when fifty-one-year-old Ellen DeGeneres was named the new
face of CoverGirl, it was the next logical step in the movement of celebrating real women whom people admire for more than just their youth and cheekbones.

• Baby boomer women are open to new brands and products and aren’t necessarily stuck on the brands they loved decades ago
.

Are you still buying the same brands you bought twenty years ago? Probably not. As people mature, so do their tastes. And as they get older and (very likely) earn more money, there is the added benefit of the Internet providing exposure to new brands and products every day.

Unfortunately, there’s an ingrained belief in marketing that older people can’t change their brand preferences; this may be a hangover impression from the spending habits of the baby boomers’ parents, who lived through the Great Depression. It certainly doesn’t apply to baby boomers themselves, especially women.

Empty-nester women have money to spend on themselves, and for many of them, it’s the first time in their lives they don’t have to put themselves last, behind the kids. My mother surprised us all when she bought a new Lexus SUV after her five kids had grown up and left the house. She had driven station wagons and boring sedans her whole life. We never knew she would have preferred a hot car all along. (Aren’t all children guilty of viewing their parents as existing solely for them?)

By this stage of life, it’s important to understand that older women already have lots of “stuff,” and what they really value is the ability to collect new experiences and memories. They feel a sense of joy and excitement at this
stage of life, because so many opportunities are open to them, especially if they’ve maintained their health. Generally speaking, they possess a hunger to learn, travel, and become more educated, and gravitate toward companies and brands that help them do just that.

•
Health and wellness are important concerns for older women. Most fear becoming a burden to those they love
.

From yoga classes to water aerobics and running in groups, older women are finding ways to stay active. Since 1990, there has been a 411 percent increase in the population of health club members over the age of fifty-five.
³³

Curves is a successful fitness company that’s bucked the trend of targeting eighteen- to thirty-four-year-old consumers. The company attracts the typically gym-shy, forty-plus female consumer with its women-only clubs that have a low-key, unintimidating environment. All the clubs feature thirty-minute workouts, and this formula has worked. Curves is the fastest-growing fitness franchise in the world. It now sells Curves-branded apparel, footwear, and workout gear through direct-sales giant Avon, as well as Curves-branded cereal and snacks through General Mills. It’s effectively extended its brand so that members can live the Curves lifestyle outside of its fitness facilities. And most important, it’s brought a lot of older women into the gym who might not otherwise have joined.

•
Older people don’t see themselves reflected in American culture
.

Feeling connected is a huge part of feeling healthy and vital. But it can be hard to feel connected when you look
around at the big wide world and don’t see yourself reflected back in the media. The American pop culture environment is pretty sparse when it comes to movies, television shows, magazine spreads, and radio networks that target the over-fifty crowd. When you travel to other countries, one of the first things you notice is that people on TV—whether they’re news presenters or actors in soap operas such as Britain’s long-running
Coronation Street
—represent a wider range of ages (especially older ones and especially women) than are typically seen in the United States. We’re missing the boat, and all the dollars that come along with that boat.