boomer mothers

The Importance of Boomer Women to the U.S. Economy

Eileen Fisher Markets to Boomer Women

Boomer Women and the U.S. Economy

Boomer women control more than half of the nation’s discretionary income and three-fourths of the country’s financial wealth. The youngest of these super consumers are turning 50 this year, and over the next two decades their ranks will swell with the force of a tsunami. So why do marketers continue to ignore them?

That is the subject of Boomer Women: The Invisible Goldmine released today by Girlpower Marketing.

Download the free white paper here.

Today’s Boomer women are vibrant and young. They are much more media savvy and financially independent than their predecessors. Yet 91 percent of Boomer women surveyed feel that marketers ignore or don’t understand them.The primary problem is that marketers believe these consumers are no longer relevant, and are locked into brands that they fell in love with decades ago. That is simply not true. In fact, research shows that these women are just as likely to switch brands as their children.

In a recent survey of Boomer women conducted by Girlpower Marketing, 64.2 percent admitted to saying goodbye to a product because they felt they were being ignored by the brand. Brands that respondents felt have done a good job speaking to them include Eileen Fisher, Dove, L’Oreal, Cadillac, Olay, Amazon, Target and Avon.

The days of Boomer women being ignored by marketers are numbered. More than any generation before, these women know their own power and won’t be marketed to in a disingenuous way. Trillions of dollars are at stake as marketers begin to discover the unexpected consumer gold mine that these women are.

How Marketing to Moms Is Like Marketing to Boomers

Marketing to Boomers

In preparing for this year’s M2Moms –The Marketing to Moms Conference, I’ve touched based with a number of the speakers to find out what’s on their minds. I’ve been struck by how much of today’s best practices for marketing to the current batch of Millennial moms can be directly applied to marketing to their Boomer mothers.

Moms are Brand-Disloyal: So are Boomers

Stacy DeBroff founded Mom Central, a consulting firm and online resource for moms and mommy bloggers. Her recent research has shown her that “Moms have become untethered in their brand loyalties, partly as a result of the Recession and partly as a result of the social media culture. Moms are willing to leave brands.

I’ve written before about the willingness of Boomers to leave brands as well. Old stereotypes assumed that brand loyalty, once gained, was never lost as consumers grew older. If that stereotype was true in the past, it isn’t any longer, for Moms or for Boomers. As women find new ways to connect with each other, they also find new brands that meet their ever-changing needs. Or, as DeBroff says, “We’re entering the age of relationship marketing and it’s fascinating but for many brands a real struggle.” The brands that win this struggle are the ones that deliver useful resources online and serve the social platforms where women connect.

Mommy Bloggers: They’re not all 30

Emily Bader from the Zocalo group is bullish on Mommy bloggers; she says that there will be 4.4 million of them by 2014. And if Bader is bullish on Mommy bloggers, I’m even more bullish on Boomer bloggers.

What does the growth of mommy bloggers have to do with Boomers? First, many of these millions of women will keep blogging as they age. So get ready for a giant wave of Boomer bloggers who keep influencing other women after they turn 50. Second, Boomer bloggers deliver the same benefits for marketers as younger Moms. They generate meaningful conversations and they share actionable recommendations around issues meaningful to other women like them. That’s what brands need, whether the blogs reaches women aged 25 or 55.

Bader says there’s no limit to the number of meaningful Mommy blogs as long as each one generates meaningful conversations. That leaves a lot of room for Boomers to launch blogs, and marketers to leverage them for results.

Marketing to Millennial Moms through their Boomer Mothers

Miriam Arond runs Hearst’s Good Housekeeping Research Institute and has been studying female consumers/readers for many years. And she sees that Boomer moms have entirely different relationships with their child-bearing daughters than they had with their own mothers.

This shift has created a new playing field for marketers. “Don’t assume there’s a generation gap” between midlife women and their grown daughters, Arond says. “Moms and their 20-somethings are listening to the same music, shopping together, talking together. What the mom thinks about a product or store really does matter to her daughter.”

The average CPG brand describes its target consumer as a “Mom.” But reaching that young mom is different than it used to be. And increasingly, it looks a lot like marketing to her own midlife mother.

Original post by Stephen Reily for MediaPost