- Forbes has called women over 50 “super consumers …they are the healthiest, wealthiest and most active generation in history.”
- Women over 50 are the single largest demographic group with incomes over $100,000.
- If Americans over 50 were their own country, they’d be the third largest economy in the world.
- According to a 2016 report by Nielsen only 5% of marketing is aimed at women over 50.
- If there is one thing you need to know about marketers today it is this — we are totally obsessed with collecting data, and totally incompetent at understanding it.
Bob Hoffman cuts through the garbage and tells it like it is. His newsletters have continually focused on marketing to women over 50. Brands, and marketers, have forgotten about this demographic because they are infatuated with Millennials.
Women over 50 are the single largest demographic group with incomes over $100,000
– They control 95% of household purchasing decisions
– Contrary to the inane bullshit that they are “stuck in their ways,” 82% will try new brands.
On average, baby Boomer women make more money than millennial men. Median weekly earnings:
– Highly coveted Men 25-34: $791
– Completely ignored Women 55-64: $795
If Americans over 50 were their own country, they’d be the third largest economy in the world — larger than the entire economies of Germany, Japan, or India. Between now and 2030 they will grow at almost 3 times the rate of adults under 50. And among adults over 50, women do the majority of consumer spending.
Girlpower Marketing released a report in 2013 titled “Boomer Women: The Invisible Goldmine.” Surveying 200 female boomers, the report found that 53% felt overlooked by product advertising and marketing because of their age. The survey also found that 68.3% of respondents felt advertisers never or very rarely target their age group on a regular basis, while 31.7% said advertisers sometimes target their age group. No one in the group said they were targeted by advertisers often or almost always.
[inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]The spending power of 50-plus females has reached critical mass, accounting for over 27 percent of all consumer spending[/inlinetweet], which is 3 percent more than their male counterparts.
Women, whose earning power has accelerated like a rocket over the past 30 years, and more importantly, who act as Chief Purchasing Officers in almost every household, as well as in many small businesses and corporate buying functions.
- In the consumer sector, women bring in half or more of the income in 55 percent of U.S. households.
- In 27 percent of U.S. households, single women are the sole earner, and 30 percent of working wives out-earn their husbands.
- Women are estimated to make 80 percent of all household buying decisions. This includes handling the majority of purchasing in such traditionally male categories as investments, automotive, consumer electronics, and home improvement.
- They are in the prime of their lives. It comes as a surprise to most pre-Primers that people in their 50s and 60s report these two decades are the happiest of their lives and, as you will see later, women experience this phase even more positively than men do.
- They are the prime target opportunity for marketers in almost every category, because they handle 80-85 percent of the spending decisions for households in the peak years of their income, wealth and spending power.
It’s no secret that advertisers are under-targeting women over 50. The question is why? One reason: Many advertisers still subscribe to outdated notions about the demo. “Older people are kind of written off by advertisers, as if these people are not important [and] don’t buy anything,” Dilip V. Jeste, Associate Dean for Healthy Aging and Senior Care at the University of California, San Diego, told AARP.
The best way to address such misconceptions is with data. Simply put, the world is getting older and women over 50 can expect decades of productive activity. If anything, marketers should be frightened if they’re ignoring a portion of the population their competitors are wooing. Savvy marketers such as AT&T and Chevy have realized that targeting consumers over 50 is a profitable opportunity.
