Intelligence

Life, as advertised, ends at 50

Times Online - Newspaper Edition

The over-fifties have 80% of the wealth so why do admen court youth, asks Stuart Wavell

Age does not weary them and at the going down of the sun they are ready to party. The over-fifties are the richest group in Britain, holding 80% of private wealth, and they are not averse to spending it.

Yet one of the great mysteries is why this vast market, worth £260 billion in disposable income, has been almost ignored by retailers and advertisers who prefer to target young people with only a fraction of the spending power.

The over-fifties, after all, buy more Porsches and rock music than people under 30. They have embraced computer games with the passion of youngsters and prefer scuba diving on exotic holidays to babysitting their grandchildren. Their zest for health, fitness and prolonging youthful looks has earned them the label “recycled teenagers”.

Professor Richard Scase, a government adviser and futurologist, says: “This is a hedonistic category of people who say, ‘Spend, spend, spend. We’ve had 20 years of hard slog and now we’re going to enjoy ourselves’.”

Scase confesses that he is not immune to the impulse: “I’m over 50, I was in a wine bar last night, I drive a soft-top car and my partner is 24. My behaviour is not at all like someone in their fifties, but that goes for a lot of people.”

Conventional wisdom is that older consumers tend to stick with their brand choices and resist change. But Scase’s research shows that age is no longer a predicter of people’s consumer behaviour or their attitudes. Ten years ago the young were more inclined to experiment with new ideas and products. Now the over-fifties have taken the lead.

“It’s to do with extensive life expectancy,” he believes. “Twenty years ago, when we were an industrial economy, people expected to live into their late sixties. Now it’s 80 and there’s a total reassessment of what people want out of life.”

The contortions undertaken by the advertising industry to avoid images of middle-aged people are many and varied. Brands such as Honda and Toyota are more popular among older consumers because of their reliability, but their advertisements dare not admit it.

Mature women find resonance with the faces of such beauties as Andie McDowell and Catherine Deneuve but, perplexingly, Isabella Rossellini was dropped by Lancôme at 42, deemed too old. Guinness, desperate to get young people to buy its product, is taunted by the fact that one of its “coolest” advertisements starred an ancient Italian swimming champion.

So why do advertisers turn a blind eye to the over-fifties who make up 44% of the population? Scase contends that inertia has preserved the outdated age categories that guide advertisers. The first of these, aged 16-24, retains the old assumption that women have their first child at 22 or 23, which is at odds with today’s reality.

“I think a huge amount of advertising spend is wasted because it misses the point,” he says. “In the past your 45-plus person was someone who was settled, married and wore slippers. That’s all broken down in a society where 40% of all households are single person.”

Divorce represents another missed marketing opportunity — the number of people in their fifties searching for a new companion. “They have to focus on their appearance and fashion because they can’t take their partners for granted,” says Scase.

A more chilling explanation for advertising’s neglect is offered by Mark Wnek, former chairman of Euro RSCG, Britain’s second largest communications group. “Basically, all young people want to get on and climb over the bodies of old people. The sooner you can call someone old, the quicker you can climb over them. And the age of ‘an old bastard’ is coming down and down,” Wnek says.

This attitude percolates into advertising images, falsely stereotyping older people who are in fact “groovier than they used to be” and more broad-minded: “It is completely beyond the ken of a 25- year-old to understand a single issue affecting someone over 40.”

The ageist dynamic is also driven by the lure of advertising awards — “one of the main things people come into this business for”, Wnek argues. Most gongs go to hip youth-based campaigns such as Levi and Nike, he says.

But how can such considerations shape the industry’s disdain for such a lucrative market? “There’s a four-word answer,” Wnek says. “Young people are cheap. There’s barely a creative director in advertising over 35.” But clients may not be aware of this: “When they engage an agency, they don’t know that the creative team working on their whisky brand are probably barely old enough to drink.” Ironically, most quality whisky is drunk by the over-55s.

Attitudes are slowly changing, according to Rufus Olins, managing director of Haymarket Managing Publications which publishes Campaign, the advertising bible: “For as long as I can remember, people have worshipped youth. But a lot of older people are so influential, creatively and culturally, it’s just dawning that there is life beyond 50. However, there are few brands that position themselves as something for rich, older people.”

Because customers with money are significantly older, the music industry is having to rethink the way it markets itself, Olins believes. He credits Saga magazine for some of this: “It had Mick Jagger on the front. But when you reach the magic age and Saga arrives on your doorstep, that’s quite a depressing moment for many people.”

There are other straws in the wind suggesting that the industry is struggling to reorient itself. Marketing magazine is organising a one-day conference about the older customer in July called “Challenge your perceptions of the over-fifties market” but, uninspiringly, one of its speakers is from Help the Aged.

Ben Burgess is diving off the deep end with a “major lifestyle concept” that he believes will dominate the over-fifties market in the way that Virgin pitched for youth. Burgess, chairman of Secondlifestyle, which is being launched this weekend, claims: “Second- lifestylers are at a point when they say, ‘I want change, I want to do something new and if I don’t do it now I never will’.”

Burgess and his fellow directors have spent “over £2.5m of their own money” in the past two years researching, developing and test-marketing their brand. Research has convinced him that the over-fifties are perhaps the fastest growing sector in the population, increasing at a rate of 50,000 people a month.

A lot of them want to start their own businesses. He has the figures: nearly 40% of all new business start-ups in 2002 were by people over 45 and of the successful ones, 60% were over 50.

Inevitably, all speculation comes back to one subject that inflames passions: Marks & Spencer, perceived as the embodiment of a retailer that abandoned its core base of mature customers in a futile pursuit of the undeserving — and unappreciative — young.

Most older women know what would restore the firm’s fortunes — well-cut classic clothes in plain, matchable colours, notably straight-leg trousers and jackets that cover the behind.

Wnek argues that the downward spiral of “young people hiring younger people” has infected the store. “It’s all about money,” he says.

Scase believes that M&S made a strategic mistake: “Like so many companies they said, ‘We’ve got to get a younger audience’. But the young don’t have as much to spend as is usually assumed. It’s the over-fifties who have the money and M&S should have recognised how the middle-aged are now into fashion as much as younger people. They should focus on more mature fashion rather than try to bring in new younger customers.”

Last week M&S hired a new ladies’ fashion guru. Maybe she will learn the lesson and follow the (old) money.

May 16, 2004 at 01:33 PM in UK | Permalink | TrackBack (22) | Top of page | Blog Home