We’re Older And Cooler. The Optimal Market.

By Karen and Erica

The simple truth is that as a woman in the fifty-plus age group you rarely get marketed to. Products you might want to buy--and an anti-ageing cream is a good standard example--are marketed to you using models in their thirties--reminding you not of who you could be but of who you were twenty years ago. On the few occasions you do see a woman of your actual age group in an advertisement she’s either Helen Mirren (the only older woman still allowed to exist) or--she’s selling you meals on wheels. She’s telling you not to worry because someone’s made a pad to keep your pants dry if you find you start to pee involuntarily. She doesn’t represent your real life. Your actual concerns. You know I don’t mind telling you all that I am fifty-five years old and I’m not thinking about how big my coffin needs to be. Not just yet.

This is part of a soliloquy in a play we saw a while ago, the reflections of a female character of 55+ years on the prejudices against older women. It resonated with us.

Those of us who are lucky enough to be alive and well have plans. Our plans may include purposeful work, or caregiving, or learning a new skill. And we likely are doing our best to stay healthy while we get older. But our plans also include enjoying our new free time. We are seeing people, doing things, going places. We spend on things that give us pleasure—travel to distant places, clothes that make us look as grand as we feel, chic restaurants where we are right at home, and jewels and cars and crazy hats.

We have a lot of money, too. Our cohort is wealthy. We have been making most of our families’ spending decisions for a long time, of course, but now we are spending on ourselves—having come to the realization we can’t take it with us.

So—why on earth wouldn’t the people who want to sell travel, and clothes, and food, and jewels and cars and crazy hats, not be marketing to us? Why don’t they show us looking glamorous at the wheel of a fast car in a floaty scarf and big sunglasses on Route 66? But they don’t. Instead, they portray us as the target markets only for bladder control products, and shingles vaccines, and Medicare advice. And that’s all.

These products are surely necessary. But showing older women as consumers exclusively of palliative products, rather than showing us enjoying an entertaining lifestyle, perpetuates an image that is demeaning, false, and outdated. A frail and needy image that creates barriers for us, because people who see us as frail and needy will not think of us as productive members of society. That makes us mad. And deprives us of all kinds of opportunities.

So retailers, wise up. Make us look good, and get rich in the process. We have long runways, we have plenty to spend, and we want to enjoy life. Don’t worry about the millennials. They would love to be able to afford what we can buy.