PR 101

I often find myself scratching my head when I watch television advertising or check a print media ad. I sometimes do the same thing when I look at social media campaigns. My wife and I sometimes play a game we call “what product are they selling?” Even why I know the product, it sometimes seems that campaign is not going to reach the people who buy the product.

I figured why this is – the people who create these campaigns work in the bubble a marketing agency can be. They are creating campaigns for three groups – the client, their supervisors, and they and their friends. It doesn’t matter none of those groups are often objective when it comes to a campaign. Those are the people who sign off on the idea, the plan and the execution.

The problem is that none of those people know how the intended consumers should be reached. The client is often dazzled how creative the campaign seems. The agency people have no other point of reference than their own. The research they do is designed to reinforce their own ideas.

Let me give you an example from another industry that I think proves the point.

When I first moved to Detroit in 1978, I was struck by how many miles of really good freeways the area had. Residents would boast that Detroit was second only to Los Angeles in multilane highway mileage. At the time, these were really well maintained roads. Potholes and other obstacles were rare occurrences. Maintenance was done late at night, so there were no traffic tie-ups during the day.

This was the environment in which U.S. car companies operated. I think it influenced the way they designed cars. Those cars were not designed for the typical American highway because the executives and designers drove on good roads everyday. The executive and designers lived in a bubble of their own making. They assumed that every road was like the ones they drove on each day. When consumers rejected those cars because they didn’t meet their needs, it took Detroit a long time to break out of that bubble.

I feel the same thing is true of a lot of marketers. They live in that bubble, or silo, or whatever you want to call it. They don’t understand that they are just looking in a mirror when they ask for input from the people around them.

I think this is why a lot of agencies simply ignore baby boomers. Even though my generation is large and still has some discretionary income, the average 29-year-old doesn’t know to market to us. Oh, they try, but they have no idea works for us. So, the campaign fails and no one wants to try again.

That’s one of the things I like about social media done well. It forces the campaign out into the real world. It is lot harder to stay in a bubble when people from the outside are popping it.

A.C. Neilsen has discovered that marketers are not going after we Boomers. Apparently, those marketing types assume we’re just quietly strolling around on our walkers from the shuffleboard court to a pinochle game. They apparently think the only products in which we are interested are Fixodent and erectile dysfunction medicine.

Well, them whippersnappers couldn’t be more wrong. The New York City-based Nielsen found that boomers dominate 1,023 of the 1,083 consumer packaged goods categories. We watch 9.34 hours of video per day, which beats out any other age group. We also compromise a third of all television viewers, Web users, social media users and Twitter users. We are also significantly more likely to have broadband Internet.

“Marketers have this tendency to think the Baby Boom — getting closer to retirement — will just be calm and peaceful as they move ahead, and that’s not true. Everything we see with our behavioral data says these people are going to be active consumers for much longer. They are going to be in better health, and despite the ugliness around the retirement stuff now, they are still going to be more affluent,” Doug Anderson, SVP/research & development for Nielsen, told Marketing Daily. They are going to be an important segment for a long time.”

The Nielsen research found that while we Boomers spend 38.5 percent of all money spent on consumer priced good, only five percent of advertising dollars are spent trying to attract us.

For those of you keeping score at home, the Baby Boom began in 1946. Beginning in second of half of 1945 millions of soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines came home from World War II. Those men had built of lot of um, energy, during the war. You can do the math on what happened when they got home.

By the time the Boom ended in 1964, there had been 75.8 million Americans born, according to the U.S. Census bureau. It stopped because of the introduction of the birth control pill.

I am a Boomer – I was born in 1954. I am often ticked off when I see marketing campaigns for products I am clearly interested directed at 25-year-olds. However, I sympathize with marketers trying to figure out how to reach us. Why?

Well, most marketing campaigns are designed to reach the widest possible audience. The strategies and tactics used in the campaign are created to reach the entire audience. You cannot do that with Baby Boomers. We are just too diverse.

Let me explain. Boomers range in age from 64- to 46-years-old. That’s a huge swing. Let’s look at three groups of Boomers.

A Boomer born in 1946 – the first wave – came of age during the 1950s and early 1960s. This was the time of sock hops, malt shops, Rebel Without A Cause, cheap energy and a pretty good lifestyle. This was the group who both became hippies and fought in Vietnam. They are now either retired or are thinking about. A lot of them are grandparents.

Someone like me who came of age in the middle-to-late ‘60s remembers the summer of 1968, with its race riots, anti-war protests, and assassinations. Vietnam had turned into a quagmire. The Cold War was raging. I remember being taught to hide under my school desk during the Cuban missile crisis. It was a dark, cynical time for the most part. We are struggling with the economy, although our children are now mostly on their own.

Someone born in 1964 came of age in the late ‘70s and early 1980s. I went to Woodstock – they went to discos. Theirs was the era Ronald Reagan’s morning in America, CD players, Jane Fonda’s workouts, and Yuppies. It was a much more optimistic time. They are probably trying to figure out how to pay for their kid’s college education.

So there you have it. How do you market to those three groups, even if they are lumped together under one name? It cannot be easy.