Love Those Boomers
[24 October 2005 - BusinessWeek] The massive postwar boomer generation that drove every significant cultural and marketing trend for 50 years -- from Howdy Doody to the Beatles and the Ford Explorer -- is defying marketers' expectations about how it wants to live and shop. As boomers head into their 60s starting next year, this generation, which grew up with the mass market and witnessed the rise of network TV and then the Internet, is once again forcing marketers back to the drawing board, this time to rethink the rules for reaching graying customers. But it matters now because half of the 77 million boomers -- people born between 1946 and 1964 -- will be 50 or older this year. That's the age at which marketers traditionally lose interest in consumers, believing that their choices about which brand of toothpaste or which car to buy have long since hardened and that their biggest earning and spending years are behind them. In the network TV business, where marketers are still fixated on viewers 18 to 49, folks older than 50 are literally dubbed "undesirables." Elsewhere, though, attitudes are changing -- and fast. With average life expectancy at an all-time high of 77.4 years, more and more Americans over 50 consider middle age a new start on life. Fewer than 20% say they see themselves stopping work altogether as they age, according to a recent Merrill Lynch & Co. (MER ) survey of boomers. Of those who plan to keep working at least part-time, 67% said they'll do so to stay mentally active, and 57% said to stay physically active. People now in their 50s may well work longer than any previous generation, with more than 60% of men age 60 to 64 expected to be in the workforce in 2012, up from about 54% in 1992, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. ...