AgeTech

Do condescending headlines make readers loyal? Rant on. It's just a bit ironic, don't you think, within a single week to see both CNN Money (States Kick Grandma to the Curb) and Smart Money (Now in Vogue: Grandpa's Gadgets) join last year's New York Times' Helping Grandpa Get his Tech On headline? And let's not forget the Wall Street Journal's It's a Bummer to Be a Boomer. I wonder if these headline writers go to conferences to learn how to sneer? Try substituting a few other demographic categories of your choosing in each of these phrases and see how they sound. The mindlessness of so-called journalism is a distraction -- and no doubt deflects venture capitalist attention from what could be a remarkable opportunity if only it received clear-headed attention from journalists, investment analysts, advertisers and all of the other folk who help shape market interest. One of the dilemmas about this lack of interest is that the very products that get journalists all excited (like the non-stop drooling about the iPad) can be turnoffs for a variety of reasons that could include price, form factor, weight, functionality -- who knows? No one has bothered to survey why older adults aren't lined up outside the store. Probably because they didn't see themselves among the iPad's young, ad-click happy males -- even though the product might be useful to them as a primary computing device?

2011 pushes one demographic segment into the next -- confounding marketers.  The terms 'seniors' -- and senior citizens, elderly, aged, older adults -- and various other monikers have been around for a long time. But it's a new year. This year, as 10,000 per day (680,000 this year so far) of those trend-shaking baby boomers turn 65 and become eligible for Medicare, seize on any remaining 'senior citizen' discounts, and view next year's eligibility to take full Social Security, the pre-senior baby boomer population will dwindle by more than 3 million. And so on for the next 18 years.  How can marketers straddle both sides of the boomer-senior divide at the same time? Perhaps they will attempt euphemistic subtlety - especially since everyone knows that baby boomers don't want to see themselves as old (or as represented by any of the above terms). So step one for vendors -- stop describing and marketing products by age category, so required and peculiar to the tech industry. Unlike cars, light bulbs, washing machines, radios, even bicycles with comfortable seats, where vendors don't know who might buy them, they market to all ages to be safe.

People are to blame – so cars must outsmart them. And no, seniors aren’t to blame. Today’s Wall Street Journal confirmed that Toyota’s foot pedals were not at fault for the suddenly accelerating cars last year – was it human error?  In today’s NY Times we learned that the value of a human life is, uh, rising in dollar value ($9.1 million according to some federal agencies?). So what’s a government to do to avoid the cost of fewer than 40,000 driving fatalities last year? Save us from ourselves and cut power when both brake and accelerator are hit and how about adding black box recorders for post-crash analysis?

Oops, according to the Wall Street Journal - did I say the word aging? Ugh, that's so yesterday. This was a spectacular and sometimes hilarious weekend of coverage -- we were treated to a full page on the marketing struggle to be subtle and euphemistic about this mind-boggling trend. We will for the rest of this post put a euphemism whenever we want to think about it. Why do we want to read so much about this phenomenon?  Well, silly, because baby boomers are turning 65 at the rate of 10,000 per day (3.65 million this year and for the next 19 years). Never you mind that 1.7 million in the 65+ age range died last year, so in the near term that's a smaller gain than it looks -- and let's not forget that a few weeks ago, life expectancy shrank slightly. With the 'tsunami' of uh, living a long time having fun (see, there's a euphemism!), marketers have got to cash in.