February 1990: Marketing: 50’s in the 90’s and Beyond: Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise

Middle age? Anyone between 35 and 55: “the bullseye for your marketing,” says Age Wave’s Gable

We’re not going to get in over our heads here, suffocating in a quagmire of statistical analyses better left to those infatuated with standard deviations. However, what we thought we’d do—after examining crushed numbers well-nigh inviolate (or so the standard deviates think)—is piece together a fairly rational scenario that most likely will affect the way you run your business in the 90’s and beyond on into the next century; and whether, in the running of it, your sales will swell or sag.

If you were relatively alert these past few years, casting your eyes about your place as it filled up with customers, you may have noticed how much older they were. You weren’t too sure what that meant, but one thing was certain: you didn’t have to attend management seminars to find out that the population of America was aging. You were witnessing it firsthand. Apropos that, you began to finetune some facets of your operation, based, perhaps, not so much on your observations, (even though you were party to a demographic phenomenon, you weren’t really sure of its cause and effect), but haphazardly on a profusion of pronouncements pronounced helter-skelter by a gaggle of foodservice experts (nutritionists, dieticians, the USDA, and Dr. Ruth) who thought they had all the answers about what we should and shouldn’t do with our bodies. Amidst the sound and fury of their jabbering, counterpoints of twaddle surfaced in the media that made intelligent choices impossible.

Yet, what gave rise to a good deal of this mumbo-jumbo was a growing concern among Americans about their welfare: what to do about their health and their dollars. Keeping a sound mind in a sound body through chemistry, nutrition, and exercise, became a critical consideration. What to spend on stuff, a contemplation just as important. These concerns were raised not by adolescents and post-pubescents, who  rarely encountered anything that tempered their sense of immortality, but by millions of Americans creeping up on, at, and beyond middle-age, who wanted to know how to arm their bodies and bucks against the oozing schemes of snakeoil salesmen, pillrollers, mindless medics, and unregulated wallstreeters better suited to pushing cubic zirconia on the Home Shopping Network.

Commandments avalanched tumultuously down hills of Sinais everywhere. You sifted through the rubble trying to make sense of any of it and when you had, you thought it a good idea to renovate kitchens, rewrite menus and reformulate manners (i.e., the way you interacted with your guests) to please those guests of yours (now, growing old right before your eyes) searching for a real place that served real food.

You made headway, you pleased most of your guests. You found out that dimming interior lighting at dusk was not a good idea. That increasing the size of the typeface on your menus was. Best of all, after all was said and done, you made money. You did it by the skin of your teeth and the seat of your pants. In short, you were lucky.

Don’t count on similar scenarios in the 90’s.

America continues to age. The Bureau of Census tells us that in 1990, 31.4 percent of the 250 million people living in the United States will be over 45.

Nearly 64 percent will be over 25. In 2000, 36-percent of a population of 268 million will be over 45, 66 percent over 25.These mature, well-educated, quality searching, phony-spotting, money-saving consumers, between the ages of 35 and 55, are your customers. Careful how you peg them.

Just as you would individuals of any generation, you must analyze what drives their behavior: economic resources; cultural preferences; political, sociological, and religious biases; professional values; and their enjoyment of amusements. And then you must weigh all of this against historical imperatives that colored their values: Viet Nam, Woodstock, Watergate, Berkeley, and so on.

Once you feel comfortable with your research, you can begin to shape a diversion—in your case, obviously, dining out—that pleases them, regardless of the economic class that pigeonholes them. In this context, it would be best to recall how TV evolved from an infatuation with domestic bliss (“Leave it to Beaver”) to enjoyment of the profane and the satirical (“All In The Family”) and how the latter provided a launch pad for shows that followed; shows like “The Smothers Brothers” and “Saturday Night Live.”

Greg Gable is director of media projects, Age Wave, Inc. (Emeryville, CA). The company bills itself as “the world’s leader in understanding the effects of an aging population on the workplace, the marketplace, and our lives.” One of the services AW provides clients, interested in pinpointing markets, is an analysis of consumer buying habits based on a number of behavioral and demographic conditions.

Here are some of Gable’s thoughts about the shifts in demographics to an older consumer base and how you should create a positioning strategy to sell to that market.

►The baby-boom years were not just those immediately following World War II. They boomed for nearly 20 years (1946-1964). Seventy-six million people were born during that time. How old are they now? Get out your calculators.

►Baby boomers (BB) are moving into positions of power. They are well-educated. Their earning power, as a percent, is considerably more than the previous generation; consequently, their discretionary income (money left over after they’ve taken care of fixed costs), continues to rise as they age.

► What about people in their fifties? They’re 25 percent of the population; as the BB’s age, their numbers and that percent will increase. They hold half of the discretionary income, a good deal of which they save (your job is to convince them to spend more, save less). They hold 80-percent of all the money in S&L’s; 77-percent of all financial assets—home equity, stocks, CD’s, etc. Seventy-seven percent own their own homes. They spend the most per capita on travel and recreation, personal care products, groceries. They buy 48-percent of all luxury cars. Conclusion? America is aging; the power base of wealth is shifting.

► Middle-age? Remember the rallying cry of the hippie? Never trust anyone over 30? Says Frances Lear, ex-wife of Norman and publisher of Lear magazine, “If you’re under 40, lie about your age.”

What’s middle-age? According to Age Wave, it’s anyone between 35 and 64; and that, says Age Wave’s Gable, “should be the bulls eye for your marketing” in the next decade.

Here’s a thumb-nail sketch of middle-agers. They look at time differently: mortality is no longer an abstraction; it’s a reality. Middle-age conundrum: “What am I going to do with the time left?” They are sandwiched between generations—their own kids and their older parents. In many instances, the older parents move in to occupy spaces left vacant by their grandchildren, now either married, off to college, or to work. Caught in the squeeze, middle-agers still burn energy balancing work with family and recreation.



If you market to them, says Gable, “Try to sell them something that’ll make their life easier and simpler.”

Middle-agers plan for the future: the education of their children, the welfare of their parents, their own retirement. They retain what Gable calls, “cohort characteristics.” They carry with them the baggage of the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s—Playboy and Cosmopolitan, not Saturday Evening Post and McCall’s; the Rolling Stones, not Lawrence Welk. They carry educational values with them; and, most important, they use their education to question standards, quality, and authority.

In the context of the aforementioned variables, here’s what they want from you: food that tastes good and is good for them; quality and value; convenience, comfort, and service; a pleasant time, not a fuel stop. It is what you are prepared to give them. Right?
Middle-age couple: Monkey Business Images 

Footnote 2016: This essay is 26 years old. What goes around comes around? You can read it and wax nostalgic, wishing for easier times; or, you can read it and draw analogies between then and now, discarding the senseless and useless while applying the sensible and beneficial. Given current uneasy economic conditions and the nature of the unpredictable guest, you might want to consider the tactics Age Wave recommends and think about recourse, options, and solutions that Gable talks about.

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