Friday, November 25, 2022

Know What’s Unknown About Senior Shoppers

Successful marketers navigate without definitive information. To wait until everything is certain makes us too late in profiting from opportunities. Still, let’s take into account the degree of certainty of the information we do have.
     Stockholm School of Economics experts apply this to marketing to the elderly. They opine on what needs further research. Here are the main areas, along with my comments about them:
     We’re uncertain about how aging affects brand loyalty. Much past research indicated that seniors stick with the brands they know to a greater extent than do younger adults. The implication for marketers was to devote greater attention to acquiring new customers in the elderly demographic than to keeping the ones you have. But this loyalty might derive largely from convenience. People become less mobile with advanced age. The universal availability of ecommerce could change the calculus. We might need to shift the balance toward continual maintenance of brand loyalty.
     What are all the ways aging develops consumption wisdom? Most past research about elderly consumers articulates their perceptual and cognitive senescence. However, by virtue of having been around the block so many more times and around so many more blocks than their younger counterparts, odds are they’ve seen, been cheated by, and learned to spot more false advertising posted on storefronts along those blocks.
     At a most basic level, what are the most useful ways to characterize age in the elderly consumer segment? This has most often been done by chronological age—the number of years since birth. But current research indicates it’s more useful to marketers to consider subjective age—how old consumers feel themselves to be. Often, subjective age correlates more closely with purchase intentions than does chronological age.
     A related way to characterize age is as the person’s perception of the amount of time until they’ll be unable to participate in the consumer marketplace, such as because of death or severe disability. This is useful for marketers to know because it probably influences the consumption timespan the shopper has in mind when making decisions about purchases, donations, health care measures, and even who and what to vote for in elections.
     A possible complicating factor here is the evidence of generativity—the elderly adult’s interest in leaving a legacy and assisting the next generation. It might be that as an individual senses death creeping close, their interest in planning for the far future increases rather than decreases.

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