Originate Creative Ads with Seniors’ Skills

Although the cognitive deterioration often accompanying advanced aging leads to rigid thinking, healthy older adults are, in fact, more creative on average than are younger adults. A task commonly used by psychologists to assess creativity is to ask the person to think of as many uses as possible for a highly mundane object like a brick. The superiority of older adults on just such a task was documented in a set of University of Michigan studies. Not only that, but another group of older adults generated more creative recipes than did a group of younger adults when limited to using corn, carrots, and tomatoes.
     We might explain this enhanced creativity as due to longer life experiences. Older adults have had more opportunities to observe a brick being used in unusual ways or to come up with a new way to combine the few cooking ingredients left in the pantry. When we talk about how the wisdom from aging compensates for the slowed responsiveness, we could refer to the additional and broader range of life experiences. Moreover, the slowed responsiveness might in itself enhance creativity by generating contemplation.
     The Michigan researchers had an additional explanation, though, one in which another common negative of old age—increased distractibility—becomes an advantage. Seniors find it difficult to suppress intrusive thoughts. But intrusive thoughts provide a broader range of ideas when your objective is to be creative.
     Workgroups responsible for marketing are wise to include among their membership senior citizens. Seniors constitute the fastest growing consumer demographic in the world, and who better to know the psychographics of seniors than other seniors? Plus, because of the increased creativity which comes with advanced age, those seniors in marketing workgroups could be a bonus to produce winning campaigns for every aged target.
     Research findings from University of Cologne show the dramatic effect of additional creativity in ads for a store or the products and services sold by the store. In the studies, money spent on a highly creative ad campaign bounced sales up nearly twice as much as did a campaign with little creativity. But not all aspects of creativity pay off equally well. Elaboration, which refers to how many different details are presented, and artistic value, which refers to how the ad use words, music, sounds, colors, and/or images to produce aesthetic pleasure, were especially powerful. Look for those skills in senior citizen marketers.

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