media

A Hosting Odyssey on the WeEarth Global Radio Network: Boomer Future, Aging, Business, Marketing, Advertising, and Public Policy Thought Leaders

Amazing conversations awaken a stronger sense of where the Boomer generation is heading. Amazing conversations instill clarity, insight, motivation … even hope. Amazing conversations showcase the brightest minds in Boomer business, marketing and aging today. Thought leaders. Trendsetters. For nearly a year, I have been undertaking a radio host odyssey on the WeEarth Global Radio Network. Dovetailing my new book, the show is entitled Generation Reinvention: How Boomers Are Changing the Future. Guests on my show have included a remarkable…

Smoker-ism: The Stigma That’s Killing Post-50 Adults and Boomers

If you are a cigarette smoker, or if you smoked sometime in the past, do you deserve to die faster? According to prevailing norms, you warrant an earlier death—a bitter truth rooted in the shadowy realms of human experience. Racism holds that distinctions exist between biological groups, that members of a race share traits making them less or more desirable participants in society. Pervasive assumptions about racial groups have justified destructive treatment of perceived group members for centuries. But ostracism…

Two Major Boomer Wellness Goals: End of Sarcopenia, Compression of Morbidity

The aged man struggled to get out of his recliner. His leg muscles could not lift his weight into a vertical position, so he fell back into the chair, exhausted. He sat there for a few minutes, trying to command his weak muscles to help him stand. He barely had strength to push upwards with his hands against armrests. Finally in a single determined push with arms and forward momentum from rocking, he stood, though unsteadily. It took a few…

Boomer Women, Photoshop, Fashion Advertising, and the Future of Beauty

Beauty is only skin deep. A time-honored idiom recognizes an inexorable truth of human aging: that exterior beauty is fleeting and superficial. Now this olden expression has found more contemporary implications in an era when digital photo editing challenges another long-established idiom: Seeing is believing. For background, take a look at this disquieting short video from the Dove Self-Esteem Fund: The British government may force advertisers to divulge Photoshop perfecting of fashion and cosmetics models. As reported by the Associated…

Boomers as Consumers, The New York Times, and the Value of Aging

“After 40 years of catering to younger consumers, advertisers and media executives are coming to a different realization: older people aren’t so bad, after all.” So goes the lead to a recent New York Times article about a marketing transformation underway. Suddenly the venerable newspaper has produced an article that unambiguously acknowledges what the marketing industry has been way-too-slow to accept: “older people,” namely Baby Boomers, are too lucrative to ignore even though over 80% of the generation has aged…

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Is "American Idol" an example of institutionalized ageism?

Popular culture favors youth. Celebrity favors youth. Many of today’s icons of the Boomer generation achieved fame before turning 25, certainly by 35. But unlike older generations, where many youth icons faded from superstardom after age 45, Boomer icons persist today, filling stadiums (Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen, Gene Simmons, and Bonnie Rait) and winning starring roles in movies (Richard Gere, Jessica Lange, Meryl Streep, and Sigourney Weaver, to name a few). The Boomer generation’s cultural hegemony is maintaining and even…

Obama vs Romney: strategies to capture critical Boomers+ in battleground states

Middle-aged and older adults living in battleground or "swing states" represent 41.90 percent of the population in those states. So the 2012 presidential contest may swing on choices made by undecided Baby Boomers and older voters in just ten states. Battleground states include Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Iowa, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, North Carolina and Florida. (This is a dynamic list and changes with voter polls, political gaffes and sometimes the wind.) Swing states are critical to the outcome…

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Conclusion: The Boomer Generation Is Changing Aging

Ten years after beginning a serious inquiry into understanding the sociological and cultural collision between the Boomer generation and marketing, business, and aging, I have come away with some overarching observations and conclusions. Aging is a nonnegotiable part of the human condition, a biological imperative that binds, beckons, and bothers. Aging begets elderhood. These are facts, immutable, independent of generational context. What remains malleable is flexibility of meaning: social, cultural, and institutional narratives about human aging continue to evolve. A…

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Gender and Generational Hallmarks Influencing Boomer Men

Middle age, edging toward old age, presents many unique challenges for men, and these momentous changes—biological, social and cultural—become greatly magnified when around 5,500 men cross the threshold of 50 every day. For nineteen years, beginning in 1996 and until 2015, roughly two million men can be expected to traverse annually the journey across the age 50 horizon. Being 50-something and beyond can be viewed, in a sense, as an enormous population of men experiencing the same life stage at…

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Marketing to Baby Boomers Getting Older: Part One

In 2010, an interesting demographic symmetry arrived. Americans born between 1946 and 1964—the birth years traditionally used by pundits to delineate the Baby Boomer Generation—celebrated birthdays somewhere between 46 and 64. For the first time in this generation’s history, millions of Boomers may have considered a rhetorical question posed by Beatle Paul McCartney in his 1967 hit, “When I’m Sixty-Four.” Will you still need me? Family and friends will continue to need them, whether now between 48 or 66. And…

Ferris Bueller, Honda CR-V, the Super Bowl and Trailing-Edge Baby Boomers (a.k.a. Jonesers)

For those of you now past age 47 who were born, reached maturity, and lived in the sociological wake of Leading-Edge Baby Boomers (b. 1946 to 1955), you may have felt slightly disenfranchised, culturally speaking. Maybe being shunned has even stirred deeper feelings of sibling rivalry. If you were born between 1956 and 1964, coming of age in the 1980’s, you may be harboring unfathomable yearning feelings (a.k.a. jonesing), wondering when your birth cohort would ever receive its due—being noticed…

In Memoriam: David B. Wolfe, author, thought leader and a friend for the ages

Most of us consider ourselves lucky if we find a single mentor early in life — someone who has the wisdom and compassion to lead us closer to our dreams, talents and values. It is even rarer to discover a mentor later in life who nudges us to reconsider where we’ve come from and where we’re heading next. One man I first met just eight years ago had an influence on me that changed the way I pursued a marketing…

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The Boomer Legacy According to Tom Friedman and Steve Jobs

According to the celebrated editorial columnist Thomas Friedman, The Greatest Generation saved prodigiously, consumed prudently, and elevated the nation into an international economic powerhouse following World War II. On the other hand, Boomers have been profligate spenders while failing to leave the nation in better condition than the nation they inherited from their parents.

A New Digital Art Form Redefines Generational Marketing through Boomer Nostalgia

A New Digital Art Form Redefines Generational Marketing through Boomer Nostalgia

In a previous post, I argued in favor of Generational Marketing — an approach to brand development that connects products and services to generational nostalgia, merging past with present. This approach to building brand identity and product awareness has critics. Some believe nostalgia borrows too much attention away from a product: we get caught up in an ad’s nostalgic moments and then ignore or forget the product being promoted. Some insist that nostalgia is focused on the past, and Boomers…