A few weeks ago I received a pitch letter asking me to “check out” a site targeting “boomer women.” Since the only boomer woman I know well enough to compare notes with is my Mom (hi Mom), I was naturally curious. Curious as to why I was receiving that particular pitch.
In the interests of protecting the innocent, I won’t mention the site or the agency who sent me the email. But it’s not targeting boomer women. It’s very obvious from the get-go that the site and the product it is selling is targeted to women in their thirties and forties. Maybe the 20-something marketing team who put the site together thought that anyone older than they are is damn old. So my sisters get lumped in with my Mom. I’m sure they will appreciate it.
This lead to a long IM conversation with Jeremy Pepper where we bemoaned the lack of interest on the part of most marketing types in anything outside of their own social circle.
Here’s a hint. Remember that beautiful woman dancing naked in the rain and mud in the Woodstock movie? She’s in her 60s now, lives in an active adult community in Boca Del Vista Mar and complains to her children that they aren’t sending enough pictures of the grandkids. SHE’S a boomer.
Most marketing people suffer from what I call demographic delusions. They remember what they watched and listened to when they were teenagers, in collage or in their 20s and then naturally assume anyone in those groups watches and listens to the same thing. Or they suffer the reverse delusion and believe that everyone in their little bubble represents all that is good and hip and everything outside of the bubble is “them.” Read Brian’s take on this and the comment thread that followed.
Despite what you see in commercials and print ads, most Americans do not live on farms. They don’t use their pick-up trucks to move bales of hay from the farm up to the paddock. Most older folks don’t sit on rocking chairs on their porches in picturesque villages where the doctor is known as “Doc.” Most fathers are fully capable of changing a diaper or getting a child to sleep. Lots of people in their 40s have Facebook accounts. And boomers were born after WWII and came of age in the 60s.
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