Serving the Boomer Market

Whether you’re a Boomerpreneur or not, odds are you are serving or hoping to serve the enormous Boomer market. If you are not, you are leaving money on the table. I guarantee it.

But how exactly do you reach this generation, especially if your business provides products or services that are not age specific?

The answer depends largely on what you are offering, of course. Many companies, especially those run by those who are not a part of this generation, fall too easily into nostalgia. This large generation has always dictated the trends, so it’s easy even for other generations to pinpoint those trends and try to use them to reach Boomers.

But using the past tends to ignore the present and the future, resulting in a one-dimensional portrait, sometimes a caricature, that Boomers today can’t relate to because they are complex, three-dimensional people, not stuck in the past. This doesn’t mean a nod to nostalgia won’t work, of course, but if your campaign rests exclusively on nostalgia, or if you are forcing the nostalgia where it doesn’t fit, you will be marketing to a stereotype—and stereotypes don’t have much purchasing power.

If you have a product or service that is not age-specific but that you want provide for Boomers in addition to other generations,  the key is to focus on the shared values of multiple generations you wish to serve. Generation Y, aka Millennials, share many values with Boomers, particularly when it comes to sustainability, the environment, and community building. By appealing to these or other shared values, and how you can help fulfill them, you can tap into a truly Ageless Business Model. Meaningful values outlive us all.

Similarly, if your product or service fills a particular need, finding how that need expresses itself in multiple ways among Boomers as well as other generations can guide the emphasis of your marketing  campaign and perhaps even your research and development.

Ultimately, especially if you are a Baby Boomer yourself, looking to your own values and needs first can guide you toward extrapolating those to the world around you. Find the overlap between what is most meaningful to you and what matters to Boomers and you will not only have more motivation to persevere, because you care about and enjoy what you do, but you will also effortlessly imbue your work and your marketing with the most necessary quality of all—authenticity.

Featured image by FaceMePLS.