Younger boomers, age 48 to 57, exhibit significantly different attitudes and behaviors than do older, or leading-edge, boomers, age 58 to 66. This book focuses on the leading-edge boomers, hereinafter referred to as LE-boomers, and on seniors, who have much in common. When no distinction is being made, we’ll be referring to them as LEB/S. Mac Brand, partner in Bellwether Food Group, says, “The lines between seniors and baby boomers are blurring.” Jim Gilmartin, founder of Coming of Age Inc., points out that the combined boomer+senior consumer population tops 117 million, “forming the largest economic group in America, with annual spending power of more than $2 trillion.”

What do LEB/S consumers buy? Just about everything, and more of it, at higher average prices than any other consumers. Averaged from research from multiple sources, here are my own numbers, rounded off, in some example categories (percentage of total revenues of the category):

Oddly, despite LEB/S accounting for more than half the sales in just about every product and service category, advertising, marketing, and often even product development is still weighted heavily toward other target demographics. This may reflect some strategic thinking; worry about dependency on customers dying off. It more likely reflects companies turning over these decisions to young and even very young people who have little interest in or respect for these consumers.

It is generally true: As restaurants go, so goes the economy. U.S. restaurant industry growth is predicted to fall short of a miserly 1% a year through 2019, not even keeping pace with population growth, according to the “Future of Foodservice Study” reported in Nation’s Restaurant News. The reason for the near zero growth is the dominance of the LEB/S population. As they grow older, they dine out less, they spend less when they do dine out, and they have different interests in dining. The chief author of the study, Bonnie Riggs, says that “the big competitor is the home. They find it not only cheaper to eat at home, but they believe it tastes better, they can do it more leisurely, and they can eat healthier at home.”

My own take on this adds a fourth factor, I think grossly underestimated by the restaurant industry, and a central key to success with LEB/S presented by this book: Restaurants’ delivery of one generic experience for all age groups is unappealing, and is more than enough to tip the scales in favor of “Let’s just stay home and avoid the aggravation.” LEB/S prefer a relatively quiet, orderly dining experience, so being seated near a family with young children, placed in a noisy environment, hemmed into too-tight quarters, being asked to stand around waiting for a table (holding a device that summons them when a table becomes available), feeling hurried at their table, even having a young wait staff that is impatient or ill-informed all serve up a dissatisfying experience. The answer is in the overarching premise of this book: If you want the LEB/S consumers, you are going to have to create and deliver an experience matched with their preferences, or at minimum, one absent factors they find annoying and off-putting.

With regard to money and spending power, one of the leading consumer research organizations, Pew, found boomers to be the age group most likely to say they took significant losses on investments during the recession, beginning in 2008. Sixty percent of the LE-boomers said they might need to postpone planned retirement. Even relatively affluent LE-boomers have significant concerns about losses suffered during the recession, from investments or income budgeted to go to retirement savings. A survey of millionaires for the Centurion Group of financial advisors found that the number-one worry of over 60% was overspending, thus running out of money with too many years left on the clock. Still, over half the nation’s wealth and more of its discretionary spending power is in the hands of LEB/S.

When I wrote the first edition of the book No B.S. Marketing to the Affluent in 2008, I made much of the concentration of both wealth and discretionary spending power into the hands of the LEB/S population. What was foreseen and documented then is proving true to the nth degree. Currently, according to the Ipsos Mendelsohn Affluent Generations Study (ipsos.com), four in ten affluents are boomers—households with median income of $140,000.00, although the income alone is deceiving, as 46% of this group have net worths exceeding $2 million. This puts the affluent boomers at about 25 million. Another 9% of U.S. affluence is in the hands of seniors, putting the combined LEB/S control of the money in the 50% neighborhood. To say it another way, simply, one out of every two dollars available to advertisers, marketers, merchants, and service providers is in the wallets of LEB/S.

LEB/S spending varies widely. The more affluent LEB/S, as the CEO of AgeWave. com, Dr. Ken Dychtwald, puts it, make “the psychological shift from acquiring more material possessions to a desire to purchase enjoyable, satisfying, and memorable experiences.” Good news for marketers: They are not stopping spending as previous generations of seniors did. Not even spending that reluctantly. Just spending differently for different reasons.

Younger boomers as well as some LE-boomers have been trading down during the recession, when, in the past, this would have been a group almost exclusively making upward mobility purchases, trading up in most categories. A company like McDonald’s has been seen attempting to capitalize on this trend with its McCafé specialty coffees and beverages—an open invitation to Starbucks’ customers.

This population of seniors is fighting age more than any previous generation, refusing to go quietly into the good night. It has paraded out the “60 is the new 40,” now “70 is the new 50” lines, a statement of aspiration if not determined intent. In the skin-care products industry, where I do some consulting and advertising copywriting work, we see the average age of the consumer creeping up. One company selling anti-wrinkle potions has seen its average buyer age move from 57 to 69 in just five years, and further, is finding the older buyer group easier to close on the incoming calls, i.e., delivering a better prospect-to-buyer conversion rate and lower cost per sale, and exhibiting less price resistance. Parallel changes are occurring in cosmetic surgery and cosmetic dentistry.

A big aspiration among LEB/S is quality of life, not just longevity. Seniors are living longer, and are healthy for more years, ill and infirm for fewer years, than in previous generations. The health-care industry’s term for this is “compression of morbidity.” For a wide spectrum of businesses, this means two things: First, there is greater long-term or lifetime customer value in relationships with LEB/S consumers than there would have been a generation ago, so catering to them makes better business sense than ever before. Second, seniors will remain mobile and actively interested longer in products, services, and experiences that they have historically deserted at age 65.

Whether you are left out of the Age/Profit Wave, merely get small benefit by accident, by just being there, or develop a well-organized strategy to mine riches from different segments of this consumer population depends on you and what you do.

After I wrote the first edition of the No B.S. Marketing to the Affluent book in 2008, it became clear that couldn’t be “done” in a single book either, but it was more an ongoing project. On my end, it begat a series of small group summits, one of which is available in product form now at www.DanKennedy.com/store, and a continuing monthly No B.S. Marketing to the Affluent Letter. It led to the book in the No B.S. series immediately preceding this one, No B.S. Guide to Trust-Based Marketing, which grew out of intimate work with financial advisors, health-care professionals, and others marketing to affluent LEB/S clients. That led to this. It is all an interconnected work in progress. When Einstein was asked how he made his breakthrough scientific discoveries, he replied, “I grope.” There is a tendency to want a simple, 1–2–3 recipe and a set of fill-in-the-blanks templates for marketing to a target audience, but I’m afraid real success can’t be put into a single, little box. We’re hopeful you’ll become as fascinated with the opportunities presented by the Age/Profit Wave as we are, and join us in—groping.