• by Jim Gilmartin , Columnist, June 27, 2011

We hear quite a lot from the marketing community about how "cohort effects" play a major role in shaping people's worldviews. It is said that people who experientially share the same experiences during their formative years take on behavioral characteristics in common that distinguishes them from people in other age cohorts.

Also, many marketing and consumer research professionals say the cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s endowed Boomers with behavioral characteristics that form a kind of collective personality. There are enough kernels of truth in the doctrine of cohort effect to make it appear more valid than it is. As a result, it suffers from mindless overuse. The problem with relying too heavily on cohort effects is, it obscures behavioral influences that stem from personality development processes over a person's lifetime.

Remember, the most important things a marketer should know about Boomers cannot be learned learn through traditional research methods. Deep understanding depends on knowledge of adult development in the later years. If you haven't turned 60 yet, and have never delved into the field of adult development in the later years, chances are there is much for you to learn.

Authenticity is also typically not an affect well appreciated by the marketing community culture. Yet, its connection to marketing success has never been greater because of explosive growth in the older consumer population, who don't respond well to youth-oriented marketing pitches that may titillate younger audiences and the revelatory power of the Internet.

In the days when youth ruled the marketplace, advertising creatives got accustomed to fashioning messages about limitless possibilities. In congruence with the dreams of the young, marketing message creators depicted perfect people with perfect friends and perfect significant others in their ads. And those people had perfect babies.

Sooner or later for most people -- the practical ones, at least -- a sense of reality begins eroding our idealized images of who we are, what we can expect from others, and what life holds in store for us. This most commonly happens in the middle years, maybe even starting a little earlier, in the mid- to late-30s.

Older consumers want substance. They want reality, as witnessed by the phenomenal success of Dove's "Real Beauty" campaign several years ago that dispensed with picture-perfect models under 30 in its ads. Dove's campaign for a line of personal products makes it probably the very first in its category to follow Jung's admonition to face the reality of aging not only with dignity, but with joy. In this view, age is to be celebrated, not denigrated. Aging Boomers should be marketed to in terms of where they are in life now, not where they were "back then." Yet, marketing often reflects a fantasy or heroic theme.

That all being said, marketing messages routinely project idealized images to which the more seasoned mind does not connect. Perhaps because most people creating marketing messages have yet to reach the age when reality begins to moderate idealism, it is only to be expected that their values and worldviews will seep into their work done for aging Boomers or older people. Marketers need to come to terms with the truth of the 136 million people who are over the age of 40, when reality finally begins to settle into a person's psyche in ways that bring great changes in what he or she expect out of life -- as Unilever's Dove brand did.