Brent Green, Boomers

Conclusion: The Boomer Generation Is Changing Aging

April 17, 2012 | Brent Green, Boomers

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…

Gender and Generational Hallmarks Influencing Boomer Men

April 2, 2012 | Brent Green, Boomers

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…

Marketing to Baby Boomers Getting Older: Part Three

March 2, 2012 | Brent Green, Boomers

An article posted by CNBC.com—Bust of the Baby Boomer Economy: ‘Generation Spend’ Tightens Belt—proposes a gloomy economic future due to Boomer aging. Jessica Rao, the article’s author, argues “because of severe recession and stock market losses, Boomers have less to spend, and further they’re entering a post-career life stage when they will reduce spending anyway.” While this story may be accurate in aggregate—overall national economic growth may decline from loftier times 15 years ago, due to many factors including global…

Marketing to Baby Boomers Getting Older: Part Two

February 21, 2012 | Brent Green, Boomers

A Renaissance of Boomer Marketing – The Journey So Far Following a recent resurgence of business interest in Boomers as a market niche, aging or not, companies targeting them have become more sophisticated at developing communications that tap into amorphous and dynamic values that accompany generational affiliation and stage-of-life. A renaissance of generational focus is not an accident. Substantial profits have been made in recent years by marketers who have cracked the Boomer marketing code with effective segmentation and creative…

Marketing to Baby Boomers Getting Older: Part One

February 3, 2012 | Brent Green, Boomers

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)

February 1, 2012 | Brent Green, Boomers

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…

Boomers and Generational Identification: the Psychosocial Triumvirate

January 2, 2012 | Brent Green, Boomers

GIF credit: Gustaf Mantel Three factors interact to create our sense of generational awareness and identification. The Cohort Effect recognizes that each of us is born in a unique historical time. As we mature we share many profound experiences in a social context with our peers, principally when we are between ages 15 and 25. Broadly shared experiences—such as war, catastrophes, major technological innovations, popular culture—tend to modify each individual’s worldview and psychological adjustment because of the social milieu in…

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

December 3, 2011 | Brent Green, Boomers

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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