New research from the UK supports the idea that “older” people are happier than “younger” people. According to this study, one’s sense of happiness or well-being drops from age 20 to about age 50, then rises steadily to age 70, where it levels off.
This adds yet another complication for youth-obsessed marketers. Not only are they over-spending against people with less disposable income, those people are not as happy as the older folks (who do have the disposable income) that the marketers are ignoring.
It’s not a matter of zeroing out the marketing dollars allocated to the younger age groups. Of course these groups must be pursued, and significant dollars spent against them. The problem is under-allocation against the older groups. The blunt truth is that marketers have lucked into twenty or thirty man-years of consumer spending by people who, in previous generations, would have literally been dead by this age, and yet are not only still alive but still active…and spending.
Is this overwhelming reality reflected in marketing budgets? Not even close.
DAVID CRAVIT 