Are we in marketing guilty of being
ageist? Two out of three old people say yes.
We all know the day we turned old. It was our
50th birthday, when the application to join AARP arrived in the
mail. If you haven’t hit 50 yet, your day is coming. For full disclosure I am
an old person and a member of AARP (I love the discounts).
Once known as the American Association of
Retired Persons, AARP is the nation’s largest nonprofit, nonpartisan
organization dedicated to advocating for people 50 and older. With nearly 38 million
members, AARP is an advocacy group to be reckoned with.
So what do people 50 and older feel about
marketing images? For most 50-plus people, the views are not positive.
An AARP survey announced findings in September
of 2019 that, overall, 69% of consumers ages 50 and older say media images are
ageist, and 62% of consumers in the same group would consider switching to a
brand they feel represents people their age. Among women ages 50 and older,
this openness to switching brands based on representation jumps to 70%.
Listen up all those in marketing. As part of a
multi-year initiative, AARP is pressing brands, designers, ad agencies and
clients to change their attitudes in order to overcome the misconceptions of
aging portrayed in ads.
“Companies seeking to improve sales and
connect with consumers should produce advertising campaigns that show people of
all ages,” announced AARP on its website in an article titled “Brands Are
Missing a Market Opportunity in the 50-Plus.” From my experience I can tell you
this 50-plus sentiment about advertising misconceptions is not new. I recall
being on a team helping Marriott Corporation with a marketing campaign for a
new restaurant chain in the ‘90s. One of our target audiences was seniors (for
full disclosure, I am a loyal Marriott customer to this day and I even own a
tiny amount of Marriott stock).
While I headed the PR agency, the Marriott
advertising agency invited me to attend some focus groups with seniors. They
showed the seniors a series of “humorous” (that is what we call in journalism
as “scare quotes”) ads featuring people who were 50-plus. I had the safety of
sitting behind the one-way mirror.
After the agency showed the ads the focus
group moderator asked the group for feedback. The seniors in the room honestly
thought they were being punked, that the ads shown were not real and this was
some hidden-camera reality TV show trying to get a rise out of them. “Those ads
can’t be real,” said one senior, “who would want to go to a restaurant that
made fun of us?”
The seniors gave us an earful of what they
thought of how ads portrayed them.
Later, when I was president of an ad agency,
we landed an account for senior housing and assisted living. I put on our own focus
group and assembled a target group of people who were 60-plus. I thought
our ads were great, and the focus group attendees thought they would be great
too. But not for them, for their parents. They said if the ads were for them,
we shouldn’t make the people in the ads look so old.
Marketing to seniors is tricky business.
According to the results of a new AARP survey, advertisers should show ads with
age diversity especially if they want to target consumers ages 50-plus, who say
they are eager to buy from brands that represent them.
I applaud AARP for not just pointing out the
problem, but trying to be part of the solution. In collaboration with Getty
Images, AARP launched The Disrupt Aging Collection at Advertising Week New York
this September. AARP says this program paints a more accurate portrait of how
people age in today’s society. The new collection contains more than 1,400
images that challenge stereotypes around aging, portraying the active lifestyle
of consumers 50-plus, while telling a more authentic story of how people live
as they age.
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