The launch of High50 - will its benefits bundle be enough?

Back in April 2008 there was an announcement that a new agency was going to have a crack at the 50-plusers. There was lots of coverage about the new venture tgi50 and then - nothing.

I revisited the subject after 12 months and it seemed that tgi50 had slipped away without trace.

Back on the 1st April, Campaign announced that another company, with the same founder as tgi50, is about to “take on Saga with new 50+ online community”.

Before blogging about this I thought I would wait to see if this venture went from “nice idea” to reality. As reported in brandrepublic - the venture is live. A new web site, called High50, has been launched with the tag line “age has it benefits”. I would say that it is more a portal than a community - but then it is early days.

Now it doesn’t take a marketing genius to know that the long-term viability of this venture depends on them piling-high enough of these benefits to make it worthwhile for me (as a genetic older person) to give them my attention.

So far the benefits appear to include deals with Kuoni, Champneys and Global (a knife company).

The guys who have started the company know the facts of marketing life. You have a short window of time to get it right – get high profile brands on board – attract the audience – use the audience and the existing brands as the driver to get more brands and more eyeballs. Simple stuff.

I am sure the company is has learnt the lessons from the Age Concern Heyday experience. Whilst this was an appallingly managed venture a contributing reason for its failure was it didn’t generate momentum, fast enough.

Let’s hope that High50 doesn’t suffer the same fate.

As always, I wish the founders lots of good luck and hope it goes well. Dick Stroud