Tuesday, January 20, 2004

Instructions for writing and article about the 50+

Over the years I have read a lot of articles about the 50+ and have concluded that most of them follow a definite pattern. Today’s article in the FT by Dan Roberts (The Ageing Business) is a perfect example of the ‘identikit article”. If you want to read it you will either need to buy the hard copy or subscribe to FT Online.

Most articles are made up of seven components.
1. Begin with an eye-catching and amusing example of a company adapting their products to cater for older customers. In this case we learn that Ferrari has to “enlarge the space available for a driver's spreading backside, and sparing his knees”. This was the hook for the article’s graphic: a large picture of a Ferrari and an Elderly People road sign.

2. You must get Saga into the article as soon as possible. Normally it is a mix of facts and mockery like “A recent issue of its magazine contains adverts for Bose hi-fi equipment and the Mazda MX-5 alongside pictures of stairlifts and corn-plasters. Dan did well with this and got the Saga-hit in very early.

3. Now is a good time to introduce the Marketing Sage. Simon Silvester (Young & Rubicam) is a good standby and you can devote a few paragraphs to his article "You're Getting Old - Europe's Demographic Problem Is Your Marketing Problem". You can quote the same old examples - every other writer does. The low take up by the 50+ of SME (Texting) and the static record collections of the 35+. From this you can draw some cataclysmic conclusions like “Brand loyalty and inertia among older consumers will make it almost impossible to grow the market share of new products by more than a couple of percentage points a year”.

4. Now is the point to introduce some doubt about the truth of the Marketing Sage’s conclusions. Normally this is done by pointing out the high use of the Internet by the 50+. You can then introduce the term “silver surfer” which is mandatory in any such article.

5. To fill out the space on the page and make the article look pretty you should add a couple of graphs or matrixes that are difficult to understand and if possible give conflicting messages. Dan got very high marks for the couple he chose.

6. Enough of this light-hearted marketing banter. This is the place in the article where the social implications of the aging population should be discussed. Demos (a left of centre think-tank) produced some research in 2003 and this is always worth a quote: "At every stage of their lives, the baby boomers have been at the forefront of radical social, economic and political change. The way that members of this age group choose to adapt to their changing circumstances will have a similarly dramatic impact in their later life." This is sufficiently “deep and meaningful” and adds a certain solemnity to the article.

7. You are now near to end of the article and it up to the writer to decide their own ending. Dan decided to have a few quotes from another Marketing Guru that indicates that "Lots of companies have never even thought about this before; most of their brand teams are in their 30s and 40s and think the grey market is all a bit boring," says Lara Colenso, a consultant. "When we started working with a couple of big companies two years ago, there was a lot of resistance as they all sat there rolling their eyes. Now they are slowly getting it."

7. You must conclude with two or three memorable sentences “If the generation of Mick Jagger and Bill Clinton can succeed in growing old disgracefully, it may be time to ditch clichés about the ‘demographic timebomb’ and adopt more optimistic language that even the advertising world might recognise. -Grey is the new black, perhaps? “

There you are – 2500 words without thinking!

Whilst you are looking at the FT web site you might want to view their special section on Longevity.

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