20% of 65+ consumers have severe long-term activity limitations. I wonder how many marketers know that?

When you decide to work in the ageing business you have to get used to talking and writing about subjects that marketers would prefer to forget or not know about. That includes both the young and old variety of marketers.

When you say your specialist area of expertise is the effect of physiological ageing on the CX you get some rally weird looks!

Just to add to the naturally occuring travails of older consumers, the normal results of ageing, there are a host of age connected illnesses and disabilities that they might develop.

The BMJ has researched the likelihood of this happening and concluded that

We find a huge variation in the prevalence of self-reported severe long-term limitations across Europe for both sexes. However, in 2017, about 20% of the female population aged 65 years and above and about 16% of their male counterparts are expected to report severe long-term activity limitations.

Overall, despite the expected increase of life expectancy in European countries, our results suggest almost constant shares of older adults with severe long-term activity limitations within the next 30 years.

Just think about this for a minute. When you are designing your retail space or hospitality facilities or  travel facilities or products or just about everything that all ages of consumer buy or use, you must, not 'need' or 'should', you MUST remember that a large number of them will be limited by some sort of physical, sensory or cognitive condition.

Most marketers either don't realise this or (frankly) don't care. They should. Dick Stroud