Blend Culture into Senior Selling

The culture with which a senior citizen identifies will affect that person’s consumption habits. When it comes to comparing North American culture with Asian culture identifications, a prime point is balance. Asian cultures place more importance on balance than do American-European cultures, and the effects on consumer preferences seem to become greater as the person ages.
     Consider the positivity bias—the tendency of seniors to attend more to upsides and put a happy edge on sadness and fear. This bias is seen in Asian as well as North American seniors. However, Asian seniors are more likely than the Americans to additionally contemplate the negatives.
     Two forces drive this. First is interdependency, which Asian cultures emphasize. Older Chinese consumers were shown a video clip with positive images on one side of the screen and negative images on the other side. Those participants who had expressed the typical cultural perspectives of mutual dependence on and responsibility for others looked at both the positive and negative images. But the participants who were lower in interdependence looked much less at the negative images than did younger consumers exposed to the same task. This is similar to what’s seen with American seniors.
     The other force operating in Asian cultures is the yin-yang—a view of the world in terms of balancing cycles. Researchers from New York University-Stern and Princeton University asked study participants to allocate $1,000 across a selection of stocks with varying past performance. The European-American participants were more likely than the Chinese participants to put the money into stocks which had previously shown uniform growth. The Chinese participants were more likely to invest in ambiguously-performing stocks, anticipating that a balance would lead to an uptick in the stock value for any prior underperformance. The participants in that study weren’t seniors, and there’s evidence the differences would become even somewhat greater in the aged.
     Elderly consumers whose backgrounds include identification with collectivist cultures are more likely to embrace social responsibility than those who identify with individualist cultures. Collectivist cultures include many Asian and Pacific Island areas, Greece, and Portugal. Individualistic cultures include the U.S., Great Britain, Canada, and the Netherlands. Consumers identifying with individualistic cultures also welcome innovations more than do consumers who identify with collectivist cultures.

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