Okay everyone, are you listening to me?? STOP! Just…stop. If there were a “Hitchhiker’s Guide to Dementia”, the first words would still be: “Don’t panic.”
The Motivating Power of Generational Marketing and Baby Boomers
In the realm of marketing to older adults, vigorous debates arise about how best to construct advertising messages and frame offers in memorable and compelling ways.
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…
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…
