No two people perceive a product message exactly the same way either. Each person’s perceptions are colored by inherited traits, life history, present life circumstances, and by his or her current season of life. Almost everyone recalls revisiting a place for the first time since childhood and being a bit amazed at how much smaller it seemed than remembered. In similar fashion, many of us remember our grandparents, who might have been in their 50s or 60s when we were young children, as looking very old. We carry that memory into adulthood and as the years mount up and we become grandparents, we think we look much younger than our grandparents did at the same age. However, odds are that to your 5- or 6-year-old grandchild you look pretty much as old as your grandparents looked to you at the same age.
No adult would argue that a 25-year-old doesn’t see things differently than a 15-year-old. Less appreciated is the fact that 45-year-olds see thing differently than 25-year-olds do, and 65-year-olds see things differently than 45-year-olds. All that being so, it’s important when creating marketing messages to know how people differ in their perspectives by season of life. There is a great deal of predictability to these differences. This chapter identifies some of those differences.
No exhaustive research is needed to learn about season-of-life differences between people in how they process information. Developmental and cognitive psychologists have done the basic research for you over many years. Because these differences show up in every generation, you can safely rely on what developmental and cognitive psychologists already know.
Fifteen-year-olds, for example, typically have a perception of reality that is steeped in fantasy. A 15-year-old knows in his heart that he is going to do great things—be a movie star, big-time athlete, world-class scientist, great surgeon, or an exemplar in whatever he does—because life will simply break in his favor. In contrast, the 25-year-old knows to the core of her being that what she accomplishes will be of her own doing, not the fortuitous result of fate breaking her way. She has grown out of the fantastical worldview of a 15-year-old, and now sports a romantic worldview, one that is heroic and bigger than life. The world is her oyster and she is going to harvest many pearls.
The 45-year-old’s outlook on the world and himself has changed dramatically from what it was at 25. He no longer views life from a romantic perspective. Gone is the heroic notion that he can conquer any challenge to which he puts his mind. From time to time, his spirits are dampened by feelings that there must be more to life than what he’s getting out of it, even though he suffers no unmet material need, is financially secure, has many friends, and is ostensibly the master of his own destiny. Perhaps he’s accomplished more than he thought he ever would, but for some reason feels a sense of emptiness. "There must be more," he plaintively muses on occasion.
The 65-year-old, now far beyond fantasy with no pretensions about conquering the world and having found the life balance and simplicity she sought in midlife, is more sanguine. She is agreeably reconciled with the idea that meaning and purpose, together with life satisfaction, come from within—not from what happens or does not happen in the external world. She has achieved social autonomy. A need for others is no longer a centering focus. Having attained that state of social emancipation, she embraces others for who they are, not for what they can do for her. Paradoxically, as her dependence on others subsided, her appreciation of others has grown stronger. She now likes many things better and appreciates them more, and what she doesn’t like is rarely a serious bother. She just shuts it out of her consciousness. She learned over many years that keeping something unpleasant in the mind pollutes it and keeps a person from having pleasurable experiences with things more worthy of thinking about.
Each of those four people reflect worldviews that have evolved in a remarkably consistent pattern from one season of life to the next, and generally reflecting the following themes, by season:
- Spring (childhood). This season is characterized by fantastic, magical themes.
- Summer (young adulthood). This season is characterized by romantic, heroic themes.
- Fall (middle adulthood). This season is characterized by realistic, introspective themes.
- Winter (late adulthood). This season is characterized by ironic, paradoxical themes.
To ensure a clear understanding of what we mean by worldview, it’s worth reflecting again on Danah Zohar’s definition:
"A theme which integrates the sense of self, the sense of self and others, and the sense of how these relate to the wider world—to Nature and other creatures, to the environment as a whole, to the planet, the universe, and ultimately to God—to some overall purpose and direction … A successful worldview must, in the end, draw all these levels—the person, the social, and the spiritual— into one coherent whole. If it does so, the individual has access to some sense of who he is, why he is here, how he relates to others, and how it is valuable to behave."
The characteristic worldview of each season influences how a person "integrates the sense of self, the sense of self and others, and the sense of how these relate to the wider world." This is not to suggest that everyone in the same season of life has the same worldview—or even one similar. However, no one can seriously argue that the worldviews of children and adolescents are not generally fantastical and magical or that young adults’ worldviews are not generally romantic and heroic. Few middle-agers would deny being more realistic than they once were, and most elderly would subscribe to the idea that life is filled with more irony and paradox than imaginable when their worldviews were circumscribed by the certainty of youth. Psychologist Dan McAdams sees those season-of-life attributes as personal myth themes—themes that guide us as we act out our continuously evolving life stories from one season of life to the next.
Marketing messages can evoke strong emotional responses when they resonate deeply with people’s worldviews. Nike’s "Just do it!" resonates strongly with the young who see few barriers and are inclined toward immoderate self-expression. In contrast, New Balance’s "Achieve new balance" deliberately plays to the midlife worldview that values moderation in self-expression and recognizes limitations.
In the last chapter, we examined the five primary core value systems that are present in our makeup at birth from which arise our needs and motivations. Our objective in this chapter is to lay the foundation necessary for understanding how these five systems lead to evolutionary changes in worldviews, values, needs, and motivations throughout the four seasons of life.