The Boomer Attitude

American Demographics, Oct 1, 2002 by Carol M. Morgan, Doran J. Levy

Byline: CAROL M. MORGAN AND DORAN J. LEVY

While everyone agrees that the U.S. population is aging, few companies have included Baby Boomers and their elders in their marketing plans. At age 52, if not 49, mature consumers silently drop into marketing oblivion. The bulk of advertising dollars continues to be placed against younger consumers who spend far less than their parents and grandparents. Of those who have grappled with the Baby Boomer and older market, few have done so successfully. Most have found that a mass-market approach doesn't work. Faced with a highly diverse and largely unknown market, frustrations arise over how to identify and reach mature targets.

While today's technology enables us to embed attitudes or psychographics into databases and use them for media selection, many marketers remain mired in simplistic views of the mature market. Profitable marketing to the mature entails capturing this population's complexities. Rather than segment the mature market based on one variable, such as age or life stage, what's needed is a comprehensive approach that takes into account an entire range of variables. Behavior, demographics, media and Internet usage, informal sources of information and life-stage issues must be layered on a psychographic segmentation strategy in order to develop realistic and effective targets.

Our 35 years of experience focused on developing proprietary segmentation strategies for clients on a wide variety of topics, as well as our work in segmenting the mature market, demonstrate to us that the most reliable and actionable segmentation strategies fulfill the following five criteria:

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The segmentation strategy must be closely tied to a specific product, issue or service.

The more specifically a segmentation study is focused on a product, service or issue, the more actionable the segmentation strategy will be. Studies based on cohort analysis, general personality traits, life stage, values, general psychographics and lifestyle are inherently weak because they do not tie mature consumer segments to anything specific. The usefulness of such studies for sales and marketing tasks, such as product development, messaging, pricing or database marketing, is extremely limited.

We would counsel a cruise marketer, for example, to consider a custom segmentation specifically examining attitudes toward cruises or, even more specifically, one examining how destination affects the motivations to cruise. But cruise marketers face competition from all forms of travel, from recreational vehicles to packaged tours. Important insights can be obtained by overlaying a more general travel segmentation with a custom one specifically on cruising.

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The segmentation strategy should be based on multiple and redundant measures.

Today, many other psychographic segmentation studies are created using statistical techniques that can often mislead marketers and reduce the value of such studies. In the process of creating a psychographic segmentation, these scientific techniques define some of the attitudinal measures as redundant. The statistical software used pulls out a group of scales as related in some way.

As a next step, these methods require that marketers reduce the number of attitudinal measures or scales the program has selected. In this second step, marketers use intuition, not scientific methods, to figure out the relationship or shared meaning among the group of scales, selecting a scale as representative of the group.

For example, in measuring the dimension of frugality, an interest in saving, a dedication to investing and a search for value, may all have been included in the original set of scales to which respondents reacted. These commonly used techniques and the marketer's resulting need to find a representative scale could lead him or her to intuit that any one of these scales actually represents the dimension of frugality.

This approach can result in incorrect interpretations and a vast reduction in the insights a psychographic segmentation can deliver. From our perspective, these conventionally created segmentations provide little depth. The nuances, shadings and details of a target segment's motivations, all of which provide marketers with valuable guidance, are missing.

In creating our segmentation strategies, we cast the widest possible net and examine scores of attitudes. These attitudes represent different perspectives on a dimension, such as cost or convenience or ease of use, related to a product or service. It isn't sufficient to measure, for example, a respondent's reaction to one scale. For greater assurance, any dimension should be explored from several different perspectives. A sufficient level of redundancy creates a higher level of certainty of developing a credible segmentation.

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The segmentation strategy should overlay multiple psychographic segmentations.

In order to understand and reach their best target(s), we believe companies need multiple psychographic segmentation strategies focusing on various aspects of a product or service. This approach recognizes the great difficulty in understanding human motivations and their complexity.