A Motivational Map for Marketing to Baby Boomer Women
Many marketers who believe they already know “what the Boomer woman wants” are finding out the hard way that she is a complex demographic to connect with. For starters, clocking in at anywhere from 40 to 60 years old, she runs an enormous gamut of ages, economic situations and formative life experiences.
Sophisticated marketers have begun to address the complexities of this demographic by going beyond age as the primary indicator of probable purchasing patterns and turning, instead, to life stage marketing.
But even this is not the whole story. Imago Creative Senior Partner Dr. Carol Orsborn’s recent psycho-social research study, undertaken with co-author Dr. Jimmy Laura Smull, of 100 leading-edge Baby Boomer women reveals that even within commonly transited life stages, there are individual motivational factors at play to be taken into consideration.
In fact, a woman 40 plus may be in any one of three stages of adult psychological and social development—or a combination of them—at any given time. These psycho-social stages greatly determine how she relates to each life stage experience and her receptivity to purchasing and consumption opportunities.
The notion that women 40 plus are in a dynamic period of psycho-social growth is nothing short of revolutionary, given that until recently in both scholarly and marketing circles, this period in a woman’s life was considered to be something of a developmental wasteland. By the time she approaches menopause—and certainly thereafter—she is thought to have become long established in her purchasing habits. Stable, serene, or, at the very least, marginalized, she is considered an undesirable target market and, in the eyes of most marketers, invisible.
However, for many of the Boomer women in our study, their lives are anything but serene. Even if they have made peace with certain aspects of their lives, the majority of women are in transition from one stage to another in relation to at least one major life issue. In most cases, they are transiting stages in multiple areas simultaneously, providing marketers with fertile opportunities to provide solutions and options for their changing needs, interests and motivations.
Far from buying into the belief that their power and impact is destined to diminish as they age, Boomer women are quickly shedding the old stereotypes. Many, in fact, have come to view aging as the means of actualizing their true potential and tapping into their ever-growing reservoir of self-knowledge, external resources and communal wisdom.
This notion of lifelong development stands in contrast to the classical developmental theorists. From the perspectives of Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg and Erik Erikson, people at midlife and beyond were largely perceived as primarily passive recipients of their early childhood influences and/or predispositions — at most harvesters and no longer creators of their destinies.
Clearly, there is a discrepancy between what the classical theorists taught and the reality for today’s dynamic generation of Baby Boomer women. In fact, what is desperately needed is a more accurate model of adult development, providing marketers with new tools to help them better understand the motivations, needs and aspirations of women 40+. ; ; What follows, therefore, is a description of three progressive stages of psychological and spiritual development applicable to women of the Baby Boom generation, greatly enhancing the effectiveness of life stage marketing programs.
SOURCE: imagocreative.com
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