Alice might be called the stereotypical number two child. "God knows, we tried," Mary sometimes says. "She just has to be her own person, as she used to say. Always being a bit different. She made those teen years in the crazy ’70s tough on everyone, including herself. She now seems to be always searching for herself. Haven’t heard from her in months. Still looking for herself, I guess."
Maslow said that there must be substantial gratification of needs at one level in his hierarchy of basic needs before a person is able to achieve substantial needs gratification at a higher level. Some people get stuck at a lower basic-needs level, staying there longer than most of their chronological peers. Gradually, the gulf in maturity between them and their chronological peers reaches the point where the slower-growing person becomes painfully aware that life is not delivering what he or she thinks it should be delivering. Such people are prone to regarding the source of their problems as "bad luck" or other people rather than of their own making. Honest admission of immaturity is virtually impossible. One can never see one’s own face until one reaches the summits of full humanness.
Twenty or thirty years of psychologically operating at more or less the same levels of immaturity become demoralizing and drain a person’s zest for life. This diminishment of spirit can dampen the kinds of interests that would make a person a significant consumer of discretionary expenditure items. Let’s look more deeply into Alice Erskine’s life, for it is important to understand why her significance to marketers is not great despite her good income—not great, that is, unless a marketer knows how to connect with her disturbed midlife soul and help her process her life to higher levels of satisfaction, or to at least lower levels of discomfiture.
Alice Erskine is stuck somewhere in Maslow’s ladder between "safety and security" and "love and belonging." She can never fully commit to others because she runs perpetually insecure. She has not defined herself in ways that give her a comfortable sense of identity, hence a sense of really belonging. She seems condemned to a Sisyphus sentence of periodically glimpsing success in her aspirations, but falling back to try once again.
Alice, at 45, is beyond the years of dominance by materialistic aspirations without having achieved much materialistic gratification. She is particularly unfulfilled in terms of animate "possessions." To her low-simmering regret, she has no real family of her own making. Her daughter Heather spent most of her first five years with her grandparents and has spent many summers after that with them as well.
Alice owns a small condo, enjoys a respectable though not great income as a real estate sales agent, and has a moderately priced four-year-old Saturn. But, her worldly possessions are few, her expenditures for services increasingly less, and her dissatisfaction with life great. For Alice, possessions do not define her identity according to her self-image, though she once dreamed of a home in the suburbs, a husband, children, and most of the traditional accoutrements of the traditional life that characterized her childhood.
Alice is a good customer in some regards, however. Ever in search of the key to a satisfying life, Alice periodically attends seminars and retreats on self-improvement. She has a large library of how-to articles on solving personal problems (How to Get A Man; How To Get Rid of a Man; How to Advance in Your Career; Why Career Is Not the Key to Happiness, etc.). What Alice has been unable to find in the natural course of life that could lead her into full mature adulthood, she is trying to find at Amazon.com.
Alice is also potentially a good travel customer. She has taken a few trips over the years, in search of the romantic, but now is thinking about trips to learn about things—culture, geography, and history sorts of things.
Apart from some basic necessities (food, clothing, cosmetics, etc.), Alice generally has no particular distinction as a consumer. What she needs and what she buys has little relationship to her age. She is of little importance to marketers targeting mature adults. She is not a mature adult and likely will not be or, in Maslow’s terms, she will never reach "full humanness."