Given the differences that can exist between older and younger customers in the meanings they draw from marketing messages, how realistic is it to develop messages for multiple age groups? This is a pertinent question given that ageless marketing is about marketing to multiple age groups.
It is widely believed, of course, that showing older people in ads tends to alienate younger people. But that is too simplistic a view. In fact, it is easier to target older people and pick up younger buyers than the other way around. The successes of brands like New Balance and Harley-Davidson across a wide age range support that. The trick is to project values and use presentation techniques that speak across generational divides. New Balance invokes values that have cross-generational appeals while Harley-Davidson uses conditional positioning that allows people of all ages to picture themselves on a Harley. A few years ago, Wachovia Bank used children in an enormously successful campaign to dissolve the issue of age.
Wachovia posed a sizeable challenge to Interpublic agency, Long Haymes Carr, now Mullen LHC in Charlotte, North Carolina. The agency drew on the tenets of ageless marketing to solve the challenge. Wachovia Bank had some unknown number of unsettled customers stemming from a wave of mergers and acquisitions, a condition that commonly occurs in banking. Long Haymes Carr’s challenge was framed by Wachovia’s desire for a single campaign that would resonate positively throughout its entire customer base, from heads of major corporations and small businesses to young people starting careers and families to empty nesters and retirees.
The campaign theme was Wachovia as a ready partner helping customers meet their needs. That was implicit in the theme line, "We are there." To put legs on the theme, a new action-oriented tagline was scripted: "Let’s get started." The tagline was not about the bank brand, but about relationships with customers. At face value, neither the campaign theme nor tagline may seem to be prize-winning. But the context in which they were used gave the theme and tagline distinctive meanings. They were contextually grounded in the lives and minds of children.
A more conventional approach might have used different commercials and print ads for each customer type. That could have been more costly, and as measured by the campaign’s stunning success, less effective. To give you a feel for the campaign, the most successful at the time in Wachovia’s history, as measured by ROI analysis, here is the storyline of one of the commercials:
A nerdy, plump nine-year-old sits plaintively on the sidelines at a dance while his peers are having a great time on the dance floor. A winsome young lady of about the same age, but a few inches taller, approaches him and asks him for a dance. Suddenly, the room is electrified as the other boys cast their eyes on the newly formed couple, wondering how the chubby nerd did it. The underlying message of the commercial, which caused eyes to glisten, is that with the right partner, your prospects can be dramatically improved.
Wachovia said in its next two annual shareholder reports that the campaign had played a significant role in its continuing growth. It also influenced internal operations. Wachovia CEO Bud Baker, Jr. initiated efforts to ensure that values reflected in the campaign were reflected inside the company. By so doing, he revealed his belief that a company must live the brand if it is to build strong, enduring relationships with customers. The take-away from the Wachovia story: By projecting values and images that have cross-generational and even cross-cultural meanings and appeal, you can often bypass the more exclusionary practice of segmenting customers and approaching each segment separately and differently.
Hallmark Cards has long distinguished itself with advertising that crosses generational divides by invoking family values and themes. Many of its ads and commercials give proof that it is easier to transcend age with right brain-oriented messages and imagery than with left brain-oriented messages. Hallmark has never sold features and benefits. It sells relationships.
McDonald’s used to draw quite effectively on right brain humanistic themes. It established empathetic connections with people of all races, cultures, age, and personal circumstances. Some years back it ran a poignant commercial featuring a young man with Down’s syndrome. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, several commercials featured older people to the acclaim of all ages. One commercial, showing an elderly gentleman eyeing an elderly woman he is obviously interested in as he looks for a place to sit, evoked pleasure among people of all ages because it projected that universal opiate, romance. McDonald’s may have not fared so well in the marketplace in recent years, at least in part, because it abandoned its right brain perspective on marketing to be drawn into Burger King’s left brain promotion of economic value. McDonald’s stopped projecting human values in favor of projecting alleged product values.