Working with the Older Client

David Wolfe writes a fascinating post in his Ageless Marketing Blog about the differences in marketing to older vs. younger consumers. I work with a lot of older (65 years and up) clients and found his tips very interesting:

Older consumers’ more inner focused decision processes pose challenges to marketers who are more accustomed to pitching to the objectively biased minds of younger consumers that favor direct, unambiguous marketing statements. Brain scans in fact have shown that younger minds struggle more with clarifying ambiguity than older minds generally do.

In fact, older minds are more quickly repelled by black-and-white marketing claims. The ambiguity implicit in saying something “could be” or “perhaps is” is less likely to challenge the older person’s need for feeling independent in making decisions about the worth and meaning of what a marketer says.

One of the biggest differences between younger and older consumers in how they make buying decisions can be boiled down to the fact that younger consumers want to be told what something is worth and means while older consumers are more like to make that determination for themselves.

Something to think about when working with (or marketing to) the older client.