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Baby Boomers Over 40% of All Spending
boomer Consumers Are Consuming a Lot
THE BABY BOOMERS, WHO CURRENTLY range in age from 45 to 63, are in the prime of power, with one of their number in the White House and legions of others at the top echelons of Corporate America, the military, the courts, the media and just about every other hub of U.S. life. But to Madison Avenue, which historically has worshipped at youth's altar, the boomers are hurtling into the winter of irrelevance.
Increasingly, the 77 million of them are being ignored by advertisers and marketers. They're being elbowed aside, ironically, by 18-to-49-year-olds, the very age group that they, in their younger years, put on the map as the most desirable consumer cohort. But the realities are changing, and any company that ignores them will be doing so at its peril over the next decade or two.
For one thing, the number of Americans over 50 is soaring. By 2015, when all the boomers will be 50-plus, folks aged 50 to 75 will account for 40% of adult consumers, up from 36.8% now. And they will boast the most spendable cash. Yet advertisers and marketers still seem to devote about 90% of their energy to wooing the 18-49 group, and 10% to those 50-plus.
"To most marketers and the management they report to, when you turn 50, you're dead," says John W. Martin, CEO of the Boomer Project (www.boomerproject.com), an online marketing and research organization, and co-author of a book called Boomer Consumer.
What is a Baby Boomer?
That big blue triple-hump on the left. That's us. What's a "baby boomer"? After World War II ended, there was a very large increase in the number of births -- a baby boom. This boom started in late 1945, and continued into the early 1960s. Some cut it off at 1960, while others let it ride as late as 1964. If you were born during the years 1945-1964, you're a baby boomer. Most of us were the parents of the Woodstock and Free Love movements. We fought in Viet Nam and other places. The Civil Rights movement? We were grown up and voting for it when the youngsters of the time were getting stoned on the lawn and calling it a "protest". Okay, we got stoned on the lawn sometimes too. What, you think you invented it? We created the Internet, created home computing, built NORAD, stamped out McCarthyism, and went to the moon. |
