Companies are quietly redesigning their products to accommodate the needs of (shh, don’t say it aloud) aging baby boomers. So reports the Wall Street Journal. “The generation that sent diaper sales soaring in the 1960s, bought power suits in the 1980s and indulged in luxury cars in the 2000s is getting ready to retire: The oldest boomers turn 65 this year. . . . But there’s a catch: Baby boomers, famously demanding and rebellious, don’t want anyone suggesting they’re old.”
Marketers, always alert to the sensitivities of this most self-absorbed of cohorts, are developing products and shopping environments that will appeal to the needs of, let us say, ripening baby boomers without ever using the “o” word. “Surreptitiously, companies are making typefaces larger, lowering store shelves to make them more accessible and avoiding yellows and blues in packaging — two colors that don’t appear as sharply distinct to older eyes.”
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It may be autumn for the boomers, but it’s springtime for the marketing euphemists. Bathroom-fixture maker Kohler, the WSJ reports, set its wizards the task of renaming the “grab bar” — a shower fixture for, shall we say, experienced bathers. They came up with “belay” (after the mountaineering term), and designed it to blend unobtrusively into the tile wall. Whether Kohler considered that mature eyes might not be able to find the subtle “belay” in an emergency we don’t know.
Maybe we should be grateful for euphemisms in a culture that is otherwise awash in vulgarity. But really — “Low T”? You’ve seen the commercials, I’m sure. “Millions of men 45 and older just don’t feel like they used to,” it begins. “Remember when you had more energy for 18 holes with your buddies? More passion for the one you love?” Well, “don’t blame it on aging,” Abbott Laboratories advises. “Call your doctor,” because what in other times and places was considered normal is now “a treatable condition called low testosterone or low T.” If at 55 you don’t feel 19, call your doctor and get a drug to fix it.
More-tempered women present even greater challenges for marketers. Boomer women, a business website reminds readers, constitute 37 percent of those online, and women in general make 80 percent of household purchasing decisions. In order not to offend these potential customers, the site advises avoiding the words “senior,” “older women,” “silver surfers or silver anything,” and particularly “grandma, grandmother, grandparents, grannies.” Boomer gals, we learn, “are happy to lipo, pull, tighten, and do just about anything on earth to avoid being asked that dreaded question, ‘Would you like the senior discount?’”
Maybe it’s the plastic surgery, or maybe it’s just denial, but boomers seem a tad unrealistic about where they fit into the life cycle. “When casting for recent Depend ads,” the Journal reports, “the brand looked for actors who appeared to be in their early 50s . . .Despite concerns inside the company that the actors were too young to be believable, focus groups of boomers didn’t mind a bit.” Which may explain why the actors in denture commercials are all in their 50s too.
For an entire cohort to go through life tagged as “babies” may have had some infantilizing effects over the years. An AARP commercial aimed at baby boomers uses the “what do you want to be when you grow up?” trope for people in their 40s, 50s, and 60s. One says he wants to work with children, another that he wants to fix up old houses. She wants to run a marathon. He’s going to start a band. AARP believes “you’re never done growing.”
Actually, yes you are. You’re a grownup at 21. People continue to change and improve (some go in the other direction), but they are no longer “growing.” Boomers need to get a grip — or a belay — on the facts of life. Run your marathon if you want to, but you’ve been grown up for decades!
Yet why single out boomers? No one these days is encouraged to act his age. The Vermont Teddy Bear Company recommends sending stuffed animals to grown women for Valentine’s Day. There are also ads for “hoodie/footie” pajamas for people who haven’t waited up for Santa in well over a decade. The sexual innuendo in the ads doesn’t counteract the fact that they are peddling gifts more appropriate for six-year-olds.
The styles that are marketed to “tween” girls — those between 10 and 12 — on the other hand, are all about premature sexuality. Why is it so hard to get this right?
Age matters. What’s right at 20 is not right at 60 — or 10. The only dignified way to navigate through life’s stages is not to deny that.
Wonderful column with just one small correction of the picayune variety. "Belay" may have been appropriated by mountaineers, but it is most commonly recognized as a naval term.
From the "Blue Jackets Manual," the US Navy's "sailors bible," "Belay - to secure a line to a fixed point; to disregard a direct order or to stop an action, as in "belay that order" or "belay the small talk.""
Psychedelic print Depends cannot be far behind for the whiniest and most self-absorbed generation in the history of the republic. Will I live to see the day when the rest of us don't have to experience every development in their arid little lives?
Ms. Charen wrote:"Maybe it’s the plastic surgery, or maybe it’s just denial, but boomers seem a tad unrealistic about where they fit into the life cycle."
A "tad unrealistic"?? This is the generation that has been convinced that the sun revolves around them their whole lives, that believes no previous generations had had any relevant experiences. Maybe they will become more realistic about where they fit into the life cycle, but I am skeptical. As John Wayne (a member of a generation that didn't believe in trying for eternal adolescence) famously said, "That'll be the day!"
Sorry if that's a bit harsh. When you are a member of the generation that immediately followed the baby boomers -- well, you are maybe a little too well-acquainted with their foibles, shall we say.
Very odd to me that someone would base their view on Boomers by reading news stories about mostly twenty-thirty something marketers and advertisers pandering to Baby Boomers. I'm Sixty - and gee ... if someone came to me with a product or service for teens and twenty-somethings, I'd think for a few seconds ans say, "I GOT IT! We get a twentysomething and give her nose rings, tattoos, a backwards baseball cap, and have her listening to an iPod - and we'll have her hold up the product! They'll buy it! Every teenager and twentysomething will buy it! I swear!"
/// Recently I have been embarrassed to be part of this generation. The reason? Madison Avenue. Madison Avenue is never wrong. They’re the neighbor across the street that sees you in the way you don’t see yourself. They’re young, they’re cocky, and what they say about the older generation becomes the truth. People still think there was a real Mr.Whipple, so I know whatever Madison Avenue says about us is what everyone’s going to believe anyway.
—Albert Brooks
A journalist buying into what marketers think Baby Boomers are ... that's kind of scary.
I have often criticized my co-Boomers for self-absorption, and I’ll continue to do so when and as appropriate, but I’d like a question answered, Miss Charen: Who are you to decide what sorts of self-improvement and self-modification are age-appropriate?
Plastic surgery strikes many as vain and frivolous. Yet women often tell of greatly improved lives – in several dimensions – after a bust lift or a tummy tuck.
Drugs that restore virile energy and potency similarly strike many as foolishness: we should be “beyond all that.” Tell that to men who've rediscovered the joy of simple movement, the ability to rise to a physical challenge for the first time in years. Tell it to couples who’ve rediscovered the passion that brought them together, and are enjoying it for the first time in decades.
When a commentator starts running down persons who take active steps to get what they want from their bodies and their lives, I find myself wondering whether the reason might be envy. That’s a motivation unworthy of a serious thinker.
Mona Charen said: "If at 55 you don’t feel 19, call your doctor and get a drug to fix it."
Since we now need them to work until they're 70-something in order to prop up the pension system and pay for cities' after-school programs, I'd say we want them to be feeling as alert and energetic as possible.
I'll admit it, I'm a baby boomer. I'm 58. Who decided to market products to Boomers in the way that you report, M. Charen? Do you think it was the businessmen from the unnamed generation between the "greatest" and the boomers? I don't know, but I could guess. I don't remember any of my friends making requests for ads treating boomers like babies.
I hate the ads that obviously attempt to manipulate by telling "us" we're still young. We can look in a mirror. If some are in denial, boo hoo. I'm sick of being lumped in with some made up group. I'm an individual, and just because a portion of the "boomers" were whacked-out lefties led by that same unnamed previous generation (Ayers, Fonda, all those crazies from the 60's who like Pelosi were NOT boomers)...we didn't all fall for that insanity. And we don't fall for it today. Most of my friends -- both older and younger -- have been planning for their older years. We've looked forward to them because we've worked hard (since I was 16) because there was serious competition for jobs due to our large demographic. We've paid for all of the Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security...and now the pyramid is upside down. That's our gift for being a part of the so-called boomer generation. So, you can quit complaining. We're getting our payback.
Although I love to engage in Boomer bashing (I'm 43) I admit that we generations born since then are no more mature. The Boomers stand out because they were the first generation that was never required to grow up, not the only one.
But Chuck Nyren, I really doubt that "twentysomething" marketers are the decision makers on $10M ad campaigns to define Boomers one way or the other. The people in power in any era are those 45-65, and that means, right now, Boomers. If you don't like the way your generation is portrayed by the powers that be, don't scapegoat kids born in the 80s.
Charen must have mommy and daddy issues to work out.
I'm 54 and I've earned every wrinkle. Everyone in my age group and older realize our age and yet we are blamed for marketing campaigns touted by those much younger than us. Go figure.
My generation is a pathetic bunch of self-absorbed; self-centered; self esteem is the only thing that counts - no winners/no losers; entitlement worshipping; cry-baby; whoa is me; atheistic/agnostic; dope smoking hippies...
The worst of the worst is that they leading the country!!!
I'm a leading-edge boomer (just turned 63). I spent the "Summer of Love" carrying a gun in Vietnam, and wound up hanging with the hippies in Grant Park in 1968.
As soldiers, we all thought every day was D-Day and Iwo Jima at the same time; in Grant Park we thought the Hilton Hotel on Michigan Avenue was the Bastille.
In short, we were childishly narcissistic, as you correctly insinuate. In our dotage, we still are.
The truth of the matter has to do with medicine. Consider this: The boomers were the first generation whose parents didn't have to worry about polio, diptheria, typhoid, or starvation, thanks to Louis Pastuer, Jonas Salk, and FDR.
Our parents, the so-called "greatest generation," themselves liberated from ancient fears about child mortality and rolling in the abundance our new-found world dominance wrought, indulged our every whim.
Is it any wonder that we're a bunch of spoiled brats who think we're too important and special to be mortal? We think we invented libertinism, why should we not now demand liberation from mortality itself?
On the other hand, I have discovered that a not-too-shabby 61 single male can dye his hair (perhaps not necessary) and 40-ish divorced women will be delighted to see him.
Of course, this is in San Francisco, which has a certain demographic situation.
Too much superficial living. That is, living life on the surface and not searching deeper FOR REAL living. Too much fixing ourselves with a band-aid when we actually need surgery. The world would function better if we weren't so concerned with "how things look"! We have got to GET REAL and WAKE UP. Reality check 101
Well, I'm 73. My body hurts from all of the natural deterioration, but I am not going gentle...
I still take ballet and jazz classes and dance contra, English country dancing, read, enjoy every day, have darling children and grandchildren.
Okay, so I'm older than a baby boomer. But I don't like generalizations. And put downs seem smug and I could do without them as well.
Many baby boomers are part of the tea party movement actively fighting to save our country from the nonsensical people who were elected in 2008. Some baby boomers are self indulgent. But some my age are, too.
I don't like when Chris Matthews uses his sweep with a broad brush destructive tactics. Why should we conservatives do that?
There is nothing wrong with wanting to look good, feel good and get a lot more out of every day. It sure beats giving up on life.
If someone thinks the government or someone else owes him, I don't care if he's eighty or sixty, that's not a good attitude.
Let's just state the things we are for and against and not try to demean a whole group. Am I nitpicking?
I am in that leading edge of boomers. I turn 65 this year. Last night I was called "Hon" by a cashier at Target who was probably ten or fifteen years my junior. I didn't appreciate it. It was unprofessional and overly familiar. But we have made youth and informality a fetish in this country. We who, at twenty, said, "never trust anybody over thirty," should not now be surprised when our juniors do not respect anybody over sixty.
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