Malcolm Gladwell’s book, The Tipping Point, was a best-seller and firmly cemented the phrase into the common vocabulary. Can it explain how older consumers will become marketing’s primary audience or will they continue to be perceived as a niche sector?
We all have a sense of what the phrase means. It is that point when people’s behaviour suddenly changes, be it a fashion, an opinion and closer to the hearts of the marketer, the popularity of a product. One day a product’s sales are static or in decline; the next everything changes and the sales go berserk. Apple’s iPod was launched in October 2001 and was an immediate success with the gadget geeks. Towards the end of 2003 it suddenly it breaks through an invisible barrier to appeal to the mainstream consumer and become “the product to own”.
I decided to try and apply the theory to answer this “simple” question. What circumstances will make marketers value older consumers in a manner consistent with their economic importance? What must occur for marketers to instinctively devote as much attention to the growing hoards of the wealthy 50+ consumers as they do to the shrinking numbers of the teens and young adults?
Download my article and see what conclusions I reached.
