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…
Continue ReadingTune-In To The Cindy Laverty Show Friday For an Hour of Tribes of Eden
Last week Tribes of Eden author William H. Thomas joined radio host Cindy Laverty to discuss the power of trust and relationship in both fiction and real life. Listen to the interview online here: The Cindy Laverty Show: 04/20 Cindy Talks with Dr. Bill Thomas About His New Book, Tribes of Eden
Continue ReadingConclusion: 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…
Continue ReadingGender 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…
Continue ReadingMarketing 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…
Continue ReadingFerris 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…
Continue ReadingEpidemiologists, Disease Detecting, and Media Literacy
From time to time a small outbreak of an uncommon disease occurs — often in an unexpected location. Sometimes it’s publicized and we hear about it, but at other times the outbreak is small enough that most people only hear after the fact. E…
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