A news piece on breakfast TV news caught my eye this morning. A 70 year old fitness instructor was fighting the decision by a local authority to terminate her contract on the basis of her age.

As she made her case, it was clear that she was articulate and passionate about what she does. And as the coffee kick started my brain, I realised yet again that marketing to ‘the over fifties’ was an absurdity.

The issue of how to communicate with the Over 50 audience has probably been around since the first use of age segmentation. Surveys tell us that people in this age bracket feel companies don’t aim their advertisements at them. Specialist agencies claiming unique insights into the over fifty audience arise - and often fall. But nothing seems to change. Why?

Partially, it’s because the concept of Over 50’s is a hangover from prehistoric times. In those times, most people died at 60. The average age of death is climbing into the eighties. The over 50s is a larger group including two or three generations. I’m 50, and my Mom is 83 – do you really think we are the same?

Partly it’s because before, people who lived longer tended to have greater infirmities than today. Their ability to do things – regardless of their income – was likely to be curtailed. Advances in health care means older people can – and do – a lot more ‘youthful’ things now.

And partly, it’s because people were assumed to live clean, linear lives; school, job, marriage, kids, retire, grand kids, cruise, death. This simply isn’t the case now. Most of us will know people who have grown up children and grandchildren, but who also have children under 10; often from second marriages.

And what is retirement these days? Its one thing to start drawing a pension, but its another to stop working completely; my research shows that many ‘retired’ people are still working in one form or another; part time jobs, volunteer work, or – as in our industry – occasional jobs as consultants or advisors.

One market? Please.

Some years ago I ran into the work of an American research firm called Yankelovich, who claim to have invented the term ‘Baby Boomer’ in the late 1960’s. In 1997 they published a seminal book called Rocking the Ages: The Yankelovich Report on Generational Marketing in which they articulated their theory on societal norms in influencing different groups.

They showed how ‘Baby boomers’ had very different values, beliefs, and attitudes towards life, society, and institutions than the Matures – born prior to 1946 – and the ‘Centurions’ who were born before the Great Depression. It was, they argued, these Generational cohorts that could be used to break down the over fifty market into cohesive segments. There was not one segment over 50, but three.

And for at least a decade, I and many other people have used the principles of generational cohort thinking. The first presentation I gave entitled ‘There is no such thing as the over fifty market’ was in the last century – literally.

I still use this thinking, and believe it is useful in areas – fundraising for charities, for example, or service brands. But, as the fitness trainer demonstrated this morning, I’m beginning to see that it too is flawed.

The problem is that the generational cohort theory argues that an individual’s value system is fundamentally static; formed in their developing years and that it stays the same. I’ve always felt uncomfortable with this; it smacks of determinism and a lack of free will.

But on a logical level, it fails to accept that while all situations a person finds himself in will be assessed by their previous, ‘formative’ experiences, each new experience modifies those assessment criteria.

And given the dramatic changes in life after fifty as noted above, the value systems of individuals in each cohort are evolving in less than consistent ways. The trainer on TV had the biological age of a Mature, but was attitudinally a Baby Boomer – and she’s not alone.

So the ‘fifty plus market’ is an absurdity, since it combines more than one generation. The ‘life stage’ or ‘life event’ based segmentation is unsound because we no longer live linear lives. And the cohort theory – while still useful – is also flawed.

So how do you market to the over fifties? The same way you market to the under fifties: by finding the key relevant, driving insights for your brand in your market sector that will influence your prospects; a segment which in most cases should not be defined solely – or even primarily – by age.

Treat age as you would any other filter, like socio demographics or TV region: a useful piece of information, but not the end all – be all that determines the appeal of a brand, product, or advertising execution. Forget the idea that there is some ‘magic bullet’ solution, some ultimate technique that will suddenly inspire millions of people who happen to have had their birth day before 1957, and get back to the basics of good marketing.

And please, please stop calling it ‘the over fifties market’. Now that I’m in it, I hate the phrase even more.

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