Marketing to the over 50s life stages conference

I have just spent a really interesting and useful couple of days at that Marketing Week life stages conference. It was fascinating to hear how companies are coming to terms with the issues of 50+ Marketing. There were speakers from Boots, AXA Sun Life, SAGA, LA Fitness, Kimberley-Clark, Fred Olsen Cruises and The Bradford Group. The Henley Centre’s presentation was its usual high quality. It posed some interesting questions like ‘if the centre of gravity is moving to the 50+ why are they not more visible’ and ‘why is it that the media is even more youth centric when all of the demographic pressure is going in the opposite direction’. I respected their honesty for admitting they did not have the answers to these questions.

Over coming weeks I will review some of these issues and the presentations from the companies.

The joint sponsor of the event was Diametric, an organisation that focuses on ‘helping companies unlock the value of the Over 50s customers. Not surprisingly this part of the company is called ‘Grey Matters’. The company MD, Robert Diamond, has an article published in the current edition of the Marketing Society’s journal ‘why fmcg marketers need to wake up to older consumers’. Part of the article is an extract from my white paper ‘making websites 50+ friendly’.

As a speaker at the event I encouraged members of the audience to get involved with this blog. Let’s hope I have been successful and we can get some new people giving their insights into the subject. If anybody still needs to be convinced about the marketing benefits of blogging have a read of this article.