Notwithstanding limitations on how much people can tell researchers about their motivations, needs, and other dimensions of their behavior, what young people tell a researcher tends to be more useable than testimonies by older adults. That is because the worldviews, values, and behavior of young people tend to be more closely aligned with those of their peers. This makes it easier to segment younger people and target them according to the characteristics by which they have been classified.
Meaningful segmentation of older people is more challenging because they are more individuated. In one shopping context, an older person may fall into one segment, while falling into another segment in another shopping context.
Take 58-year-old Janet Greene. Yesterday she checked out her weekly groceries at a total cost of $137.46 less $12.78 in meat selections marked down because of expiring buy dates, $17.71 in Safeway Club card savings, and $4.75 in manufacturers’ coupons. Her total savings were a bit over 25 percent of her total cost, or $35.24, making her final bill $102.22. She walked away from her neighborhood Safeway that day feeling quite proud of herself. Last week her savings came to only 19 percent.
Janet and her retired 65-year-old husband George watch their spending closely. Janet’s product selections and buying behavior put her in a category of like-minded, like-behaving retirees who are highly price sensitive. Or does it?
Driving away from her neighborhood Safeway that day, in a 10-month-old Lexus, Janet stopped at Sutton Place Gourmet to get two prime porterhouse steaks for dinner. They cost her $12.99 a pound. (Safeway had porterhouses on sale at $5.99 a pound, $3.00 less than its regular price for porterhouse.) She then made one more stop before going home. She needed to pick up tickets from her travel agent. She and George are planning to spend a month with her family in Taipei, where she was born and where she and George met in 1978 while he was there working for IBM.
Into what market segment does Janet, nee Jiang Li, best fit? What about George, who grew up in Columbus, Ohio? In what segment does he belong? Perhaps Janet belongs in one segment and George in another. But that makes marketing to the household complicated. Many purchases are jointly decided. Should the household be categorized in yet a third segment? How can the shopping and buying behavior of this household, and of George and Janet as individuals, be reduced to numbers? Whose "numbers" should prevail in a predictive modeling program? Perhaps we should just forget George as an individual customer because as sales-people who work with retirees know, all things being equal, women more often prevail. So, maybe things are not quite all that equal.
Gerontologists have a saying: The older you are, the more you become you. As you become more your own person, you become less classifiable as being of one type of customer or another. What or who you are depends on context. The challenging truth facing researchers and others trying to figure out people in the New Customer Majority is that with each passing year in the second half of life, a person becomes a more complex customer. This means that as the adult median age continues to rise, the challenges of researchers—as well as those of marketers— become more complex. Asking customers about themselves will not help greatly in meeting those challenges because they generally have limited awareness of some of the more crucial dimensions of their buying behavior and lifestyle choices.
Having surveyed various problems besetting researchers and marketers in an aging and explosively growing middle-aged and older customer universe, and having argued for shifting from a numbers-based consciousness to one that is more balanced between numbers and behavioral science, it is time to enter the new consciousness. In the Second-Half Customers Seen Through a New Consciousness we pass through a portal to view second-half customers through a new consciousness. That new consciousness arises from seeing customers through the lens of developmental psychology, a field that is almost completely ignored in consumer research and marketing even though it offers astonishing insights into customer behavior that cannot be gained through traditional consumer research.