Customs often persist long after their usefulness. There is a story about a woman preparing for a dinner party with the help of a friend. Before shoving a beautiful slab of beef into the oven she cut a healthy slice off the end. "Why did you cut the end of the roast off?" her friend asked. "I dunno. I guess because my mother always did."
The next day the hostess called her mother to ask her why she always cut the end off her beef roasts. "I dunno. I guess because my mother always did." The hostess then called her grandmother and asked her why she always cut the end off her beef roasts.
"Well, when your grandfather and I were first married we just had this little teeny pan and a decent-sized roast wouldn’t fit in it. So I cut the end off the roast to make it fit."
That story would resonate with CBS executive vice president Dave Poltrack, from whom I borrowed the title of this subsection. It was the title Poltrack gave a speech that he delivered in Fall 2002, in which he recalled the origins of age-based advertising. Poltrack observed that in television’s early years, household television viewing patterns were not reported according to age. However, one network was instrumental in changing that. Third-place ABC sought to get out of last place (remember, there were only three networks and no cable in those days) in Nielsen’s reports. ABC hit on the idea that because its audience was younger than those of either NBC or CBS, it could turn that distinction to its advantage in selling air-time. So it persuaded Nielsen to begin reporting viewing patterns according to the age of viewers.
So, there we have it. Age-based advertising, which as I will show is often counterproductive in the era of the New Customer Majority, was created to give a struggling network with a younger audience a perceived advantage over its competitors. ABC’s pitch was "Get them young and before some other brand gets them." The problem is that this idea has become as outmoded as the dinner hostess’s custom of slicing off the end of a slab of beef before putting it in the oven. The emergence of the New Customer Majority has left Madison Avenue up marketing’s creek without a paddle to steer back into today’s mainstream consumer population—people 40 and older. This is having a devastating effect on Corporate America, including equity markets depressed by anemic profits, and on the national economy.
This book presents a practical alternative to the age-based marketing that ABC and Nielsen collaborated to bring forth in the 1960s, the time period in which Madison Avenue is still stuck according to Dave Poltrack. This alternative is ageless marketing—marketing based on values and desires that appeal to people across generational divides. Age-based marketing reduces the reach of brands because of its exclusionary focus. Ageless marketing extends the reach of brands because of its inclusionary focus.
To avoid any misunderstanding, I need to say that targeting specific age groups remains a valid marketing gambit. One of the nation’s most successful ageless marketers, New Balance, about whom I will say more later, does not ignore age. While the core values New Balance reflects in its general marketing are ageless, it targets specific age groups through media selection, the content of selected messaging, and how it manages its channel relationships. It stocks its retailers with a keen eye on the core age group served by each specific retailer. By practicing the art of ageless marketing with the skill of a neurosurgeon maneuvering probes through a patient’s brain, New Balance has outpaced its competition— including powerful Nike—in annual sales growth since the mid-1990s. Its competitors continue to restrict the reach of their brands by sticking with age-based marketing.
Companies stuck in the age-based marketing mind-set of the 1960s lessen their chances of surviving to the end of this decade. The reason for this will become clear shortly, but first it would serve well to review an event that took place in 2002 that many of us who work primarily in middle age and older markets have been waiting for since the publication of SAM 1990. In 2002, Corporate America began awakening—still bleary-eyed, confused, and disoriented—to the fact that the young adult market had become a customer minority, spending significantly fewer consumer dollars than the New Customer Majority.