Five Things You Don’t Know About Baby Boomers
Think of a few famous baby boomers. Now, call to mind a few that you know. It’s probably safe to assume that none of the images that popped into your head resemble a generic brown paper bag. Yet marketers and retailers are too often guilty of treating baby boomers as a homogeneous group with uniform attitudes and purchasing behaviors.
Ironically, what they end up with is a pitch that is as generic – and disposable – as a plain brown bag. As a group, the 78 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964 is much too large and diverse to share a single lifestyle, life stage, purchasing proclivity or political agenda. And most of them are too wealthy to be ignored by marketers and retailers obsessed by youth.
“Boomers still dominate the U.S. retail marketplace,” says Matt Thornhill, president and co-founder of the Boomer Project and co-author (with John Martin) of “Boomer Consumer.”
Boomers spend an estimated $2.3 trillion on consumer goods and services annually, yet Thornhill claims that “few retailers fully appreciate today’s older boomer consumer, instead merchandising and marketing to young, less affluent adults. Retailers that fail to acknowledge boomers today, thinking they’re past their spending prime, are limiting their success.”
In other words, those who think they know all there is to know about the baby boomer generation need to think again.
