Age friendly communications from an unusual source

The Canadians seem to be taking this Age Friendly stuff very seriously. Good on them.


Today I came upon this set of guidelines for Age Friendly communications. They are pretty good. Dick Stroud

We should ban bikes in age friendly cities

I am spending a couple of days in Dublin at the World Health Organisation Age Friendly Cities conference. Very interesting. At some stage I will write a blog posting on the concept of age friendly cities. I think a better name would be "age neutral" cities.


Something that does amuse me (in a warped sort of way) is the conflict between the planners who are doing the damnedest to make cities ‘bike friendly’ and the conflict this has with a place being ‘age friendly’.  


This is nothing to do with marketing so click away now if you are looking for words of wisdom on that subject.


I am sure Dublin is no worse than London or Amsterdam, but nobody seems to give a bugger about the traffic lights. Dublin council has invested in these nice devices to let you cross the road that flash and make a noise for people with poor sight. The only problem is that they are useless unless people think that the colour of the traffic light is for guidance only.


In addition to being mowed down by rogue cyclists you have the issue that the complexity of crossing the road has gone up by an order of magnitude. You have one-way roads, bike lanes, and bus lanes. Some of these go in the same direction as the traffic some don’t. 


Let's ban bikes and get people back into their cars. Bad on the environment – good on the sanity of older pedestrians. Dick Stroud

Ahhhh another daft name spoils some interesting research

LV= (I just hate it when brand names include a symbol) has released some interesting research about the increase in the number of older people who intend to use their property to fund their retirement. I should really say, an increase in older people who think their property is going to fund their retirement.


Like all research from Financial Services companies it should have a health warning since the conclusions invariably support the business objectives of the organisation. 


Some bright PR spark at LV= has come up with a daft name. Why do they do this.....The rise of the HIPpies ('Home is Pension') generation.


The bottom line is that LV= reckons that two million over-50s are planning to use equity in their property to help fund their retirement. This is up from 1.5 million people in 2010.


I fear that for many older people, who are retiring with little in the way of pensions and savings, cashing in on the house will be the only way of raising money. Once that has been spent – what then? Dick Stroud

September issue of the Aviva Retirement report is published

Aviva, a bit like Saga, has established itself as one of the best regular commentators on the state of older consumers - well certainly the state of their financial affairs.


The September issue doesn't make happy reading. I have chosen to comment on one of the concerns - funding care costs - I could have chosen another half a dozen equally horrific problems.


The main reason behind the apprehension concerning long-term care starts with the fact that over half (53%) have no plan in place to meet these costs. Indeed, just 2% of over-55s say they have long-term care insurance with others preferring to rely on savings and investments (13%), releasing equity (9%), their pension fund (3%) and on family assistance (3%). 


There is a bit of problem. The average cost of residential care of £25,953 per year and the average over-55 having just £10,468 (Sep 2011) in savings and an annual income of £1,216 (Sep 2011) per month.


You don't even need a worthless GCSE in maths to see there is a  bit of a shortfall. I recommend that you have a look at this report. Dick Stroud 

How Huff/Post 40 aged a decade in a couple of months

I think this is a hilarious blog post about the way that the Huffington Post announced that it was launching a new site targeting Baby Boomers, with the name Huff/Post 40.



One small problem - Baby Boomers are older than 40. 


The power of social media seemed to persuade the Huff people that this was a tad misleading so they aged it by a decade and called it Huff/Post 50.


To be honest I think it still a daft name but at least it is a truthful daft name. Dick Stroud

Oldies should get up and get moving you

New physical activity guidelines for older adults has been launched by the UK Chief Medical Officers.


The guidelines state that adults  (19-64 years old) and older people (65+) should have two and half hours – each week of moderate to vigorous intensity physical activity (and adults should aim to do some physical activity every day). Muscle strengthening activity should also be included twice a week.


You can read lots more about this on the ILC blog. 


My fear is that like most of the guidelines that are published they will be ignored.  This is a great shame since all of the evidence I have seen points to the connection between exercise and physical and mental well being. Dick Stroud

The barriers to ageing in place technology uptake

This is a good blog posting by Louis Tenenbaum about the barriers to the uptake of new technologies to  reduce the cost / increase the quality of care in the home. He make a lot of reference to the article just pubished in the McKinsey Journal - Spurring the market for high-tech home health care.


It is good to see that this subject is getting so much attention. Dick Stroud

Shape of things to come for tablets?

I remember getting my first IBM PC and thinking that this was just about as good as it gets. What more could a computer do? All the applications and power I could dream of was sitting right in front of me.

I know that somebody in a decade's time will write something similar about the iPad. 


We are at Day One of tablet development. The work going on by researchers at Intel, Microsoft, and the University of Washington might be a guide to Day Two. They are working on a way of controlling the device by touching any surface on which it is placed. All you now need to do is add some MS Kinect technology and you have a really interesting interface. 


The reason I write about this is because I see enhanced tablet devices as having immense benefits for older people. Dick Stroud 

Idiocy in Euroland

As the economies of the southern and parts of the northern Europe slowly disintegate. As spending cuts start to damage country's core infrastructure and support services, how reassuring it is to know that 2012 will be the year of Active Ageing and Intergenerational Solidarity. 


Can you believe we have yet another EU funded non-event that no doubt costs a fortune, keeps a lot of bureaucrats employed and delivers nothing.


This is the sort of expensive, self justification, vapourware that the EU churns out, that nobody reads but is something that can be waved in front of their political masters to justify their existence. 


Hopefully, when the Euro does implode it will mark the end of all of this wasteful expenditure. I wouldn't count on it. Dick Stroud

New BBC web site - how good is its usability?

I really like the look of the new BBC web site - here is a sample of the home page. As the review in BrandChannel says, it is full of gestures, swipes, and touch.  Lots of lessons learnt from Apple


The BBC comments: “The beta provides a first glimpse of core design principles that will underpin the reshaped BBC Online, which take into account changing user behaviours including the preference for ‘swiping’ through content – increasingly intuitive given the rise of touch-screen smart phones and tablets.”


Having said I like it I wonder how easy it is going to be to use for older people. I will wait until the full site is up and running and then post a detailed analysis. Dick Stroud

Lots of talk, not much action lashings of vagueness and hyperbole.

This blog posting by Laurie Orlov is the best description I have read about the state of the Tele-Health, Tele-Care and Tele-Whatever market.

Like Laurie, I come from a IT market forecasting background and can spot vague meaningless market forecasts a mile away.

Anybody interested in the Tele-something market should be focusing on the barriers to entry. These are not financial but emotional, ego, inertial and very hard to overcome. Dick Stroud

The insult of all insults – too many older people are buying iPhones

Mashable has an interesting item about the comments of the acting chief honcho of HTC America who reckons the popularity of the iPhone amongst older people (whoever ever they are) is diminishing its cool rating.

From the extensive market research exercise of chatting with his daughter’s friends he comes to this conclusion. I think he is probably right.

The only problem for HTC is that young people are not necessarily buying HTC products but more likely to buy a Blackberry. I guess it is the secure network. It sort of echoes back to days when SMS was the domain of the young. 

It must be a real pain being young as no sooner do you lay claim to a bit of cool real estate then you mum and dad come along and invade the place – witness what is happening with Facebook.

Give it a few more years and young people have gone back to using landlines as their parents chuck them out of whatever is going on in the 5G space. Dick Stroud

Europe and the US are ageing – wait until you see what happens in India and China

I thought this was an interesting development – 5 cities in India holding 3 day retirement events - Retirement India Expo 2011.

“This is India’s first attempt to galvanise businesses in ageing,” said Sheilu Sreenivasan, founder president, Dignity Foundation, a 16-year-old NGO specialising in productive ageing opportunities. She said the three-day event held in Chennai and Bangalore last fortnight had registered 22,000 senior citizens and 8,000 couples. The event, which will also cover Pune, Mumbai and Hyderabad till October 24, is targeting to register over 1,000,000 senior citizens.

“The 50 plus ageing population is not a spent force but offers business opportunities for various companies engaged in banking, insurance advice, investment planning, retirement living, health care and wellness, fitness, leisure and lifestyle resorts, consumable.”

She said the growing 50 plus population in the country was a big market waiting to be tapped. “After being in the senior service delivery system for 16 years, we realised the need for convenient products, mobility aids, communication aids like hearing, telephone with special amplifiers etc are essential for senior citizens to lead a comfortable life.”

Different country same messages. I wish them well with their events. Dick Stroud 

Who reads what eBooks? New research from Harris

Not that I think you can do much with this research but Harris has looked at the readership of eBooks in the US. Not surprisingly, the oldest people seem to read the most. Dick Stroud

How long do people stay viewing web sites?

We all know the answer is : "not long enough".


The Useit blog has an interesting article that throws more light onto the dynamics that govern the length of time people stay on sites. 


It is not age related and a bit complicated so I will leave it for you to read if you are interested. Dick Stroud

About time to drop the benefits of a 50+ deal

Many financial institutions are relying on customer inertia and reducing the interest rate on their 'silver' accounts and hoping that their customers don't notice. 


Now there is no value in these special accounts for older people. They are a marketing sham and it is about the industry did the right thing and scrapped them. Dick Stroud 

Lastest employment data from the OECD

The OECD has just published the employment change during the recent downturn by socio-demographic groups. The graphic shows the United Kingdom and OECD average change in employment.

The conclusions are pretty obvious. The unskilled have been slaughtered - especially in the UK.

Older people in the UK have done worse than the average throughout the UK. Dick Stroud

International Conference about Age Friendly Cities

I will be attending this conference that is being co-hosted by the World Health Organization’s Global Network of Age-friendly Cities, the Ageing Well Network, Ireland and the International Federation on Ageing. 

The conference will bring together 400 leaders and senior managers.

The WHO’s Age-friendly Cities Programme is an international effort to help cit­ies and other communities prepare for two major global demographic trends: the rapid ageing of popula­tions and increasing urbanisation. The Programme targets the environmental, social and economic factors that influence the health and well-being of older adults, and a core aim of the conference is to facilitate and share innovation and learning in this area. 

The conference programme is built around three themes: Social and Cultural Connectivity, Age-friendly Environments and developing momentum for the global Age-Friendly Cities movement. 

If you are interested in the developments in 'age friendly' public spaces then this a conference that you cannot miss.

It will be nice to be attending a conference to listen rather than speak. Dick Stroud

This is new to me - a Generations Award

You live and learn. The Generations Award is a new one on me. I wonder if it something worth having? Methinks not. Dick Stroud

Affluent consumers are not all the same

The 14,000 respondent, Ipsos Mendelsohn research study looks at the behaviours of affluent US consumers - defined as those with an income of $100,000+.

According to the firm, in 2010, 5% of affluent households owned an e-reader. This year, 14% own one.

Last year, 33% owned a smartphone versus 43% this year. This year, affluent consumers spent, on average, 30.3 hours on the Internet versus 25.3 hours last year. In addition, 57% of affluent households visited Facebook in the past 30 days compared with  50% last year. A similar increase occurred for YouTube, Amazon, Netflix and Pandora.

These are signicant changes in behavior over the course of only 12 months.

While the 24.5 million affluent households are only 21% of total U.S. households, they represent 60% of all U.S. household income. They hold 70% of U.S. net worth. 

Perhaps it is not surprising that affluent consumers who are 65+ are the wealthiest, with a $1.6 million dollar net worth on average. A quarter of them own a luxury car, and 16% are in a country club, twice the percentage of Boomers.

These older consumers are most likely to have a 'buy America' mentality. They are the most likely group to keep up with financial news - probably because they have the most wealth to lose.

As you can see, these affluent consumers are an important group with rapidly evolving purchasing patterns and lots and lots of them are older rather than young. Dick Stroud.