What Do Baby Boomers Want and Need?

How to Reach Aging Baby Boomers - Characteristics Formed in 60s

Feb 5, 2010
Christina Gregoire

What Will Boomers Buy? - ba1969

Baby Boomers have unique characteristics that make it hard to reach them. As Boomers age, their early characteristics, formed in the 60s, will be key to marketing.

What do Baby Boomers want and need? The Boomer cohort (1946-1964) may not even know the answer to that. Well, a good case can be made that the decisive characteristics of Baby Boomers were formed during the 1960s. So, an understanding, of those early years, is key to reaching Boomers and their trillions.

What Boomers Need

Boomers need all those things that old folks need:

Medications (Viagra, cholesterol drugs, everything related to healthcare)
Fashion to fit older people's shapes
Phones with larger numbers
Shady retirement planners

Baby Boomers would also like to travel the world after their kids leave the nest. They want to do things that give their lives meaning, and they want to leave the world a better place. However, Boomers expect to get what they want or they will go somewhere else. And, most Boomers know when some Madison Avenue kid is trying to hustle them.

Baby Boomer Trends

Whatever Baby Boomers want, Baby Boomers get. Well, that’s not entirely true, but whatever phase of life that Boomers happen to be in will be the “in” stage...the "in" thing.

In the 60s, it was hip to be a teenybopper or a college kid and to hang out at rock concerts. In the 70s, it was cool to be in college or dancing in discos. In the 80s, it was trendy to have a baby and buy a Mercedes, and on and on. Someday, it will be hip to be 80 and use a walker (shudder).

Baby Boomer Generation

Baby Boomers grew up in a TV society where advertising and music molded them into a market segment. And, Madison Avenue did their best to turn Boomers into a voracious consumer society.

One of the tenets of the hippie movement was a backlash against media people telling Boomers what to wear, what to do, and what to think. And, therein, lies the difficulty of reaching this cohort. (Sure, many robots will do anything that Oprah Winfrey says, but those BoomerBots are not necessarily the Boomers with the discretionary income.)

Baby Boomer Characteristics

Boomers rejected the rigid social structure of the 50s and early 60s, and Boomers, especially those over 50 y/o, are:

Individualistic
Defiant (rejecting rules)
Pragmatic, but idealistic
Raised with a sense of entitlement
Unlikely to be anything like the elderly of today
Difficult to define

Generational Differences

What made Boomers this way? They grew up in a time with three TV stations and one TV per household. There were no movies on DVD. So Boomer children had to be creative.

Boomers made up games with a tennis ball and some sticks.
They ate Hostess Cupcakes but never got fat because they were always playing outside.
They stayed out until it was too dark to see and their parents were never exactly sure where their Boomer children were.
They snuck over to the lake and went swimming when their parents told them not to.
Boomer kids had no cell phones, so they walked over to their friends' houses to talk to them. Sometimes, kids didn’t even knock and just went into their friends' houses, as if their neighbors' houses were their own.

Can a Gen X or Gen Y ever understand people like this?

Baby Boomer Marketing Plans

Baby Boomers are used to marketers who cater to them, but Boomers know when someone younger is trying to reach into their pocketbooks. And, they don't like it.

Boomers may have cut back on their spending, but some things never change. Instead of staying at a chic boutique hotel in Paris, this group may join the Peace Corps to experience their love of travel and freedom. If Boomers want something, they will keep trying until they find a way.
Because Boomers are used to making things up as they go, they will have no problem adapting to new technologies, as long as the print is big enough to read.

And, because Boomers were once young and cocky, they will respond better to offers and ads written by people their own age. If that's not sitting well with Gen X and Y marketing people, Gen Xers should, at the very least, run their ideas by their own Baby-Boomer friends or use BB focus groups before charging ahead with their boffo marketing plans.

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