Can’t we do it all, look good, and be nice regardless of our age? A white paper called “Today’s Women: Newfound Power, Persistent Expectations” was published last week from the brand company Anthem Worldwide. It evaluated women’s externally-driven motivations—those others put upon us—along with our own, internally-driven motivations and what this means to marketers eager to understand both.
Get real with us
Anthem’s original research suggests these external-internal factors create a tension in women’s lives and that traditional marketing messages that focus on empathetic understanding and internal motivations are most effective. The paper viewed women from a generational perspective, and said this about our baby boomer generation:
- About two-thirds of us women 50 years old or older feel “forgotten” by the beauty industry, and 70 percent of us aren’t interested in buying products targeted to younger women. (I don’t think Olay has forgotten us, do you?)
- Almost 60 percent of us feel expected to be attractive and feminine.
- More than 50 percent of us are motivated to work and 70 percent are motivated to have financial independence
- Today, the study finds close to 25 percent of women 50 and older working outside the home. In addition, almost 60 percent of working boomers believe they’ll continue working into their retirement years.
- When it comes to love, 35 percent of all boomers have been divorced, with this group making up the majority of American divorcees. Read more about that in a recent Mind Your Body blog.
- Some 60 percent of baby boomer women are motivated to be in a relationship, so much so that….
- Users of online dating sites who are 50 and older have grown twice as fast as all other age groups.
Baby boomer women buy based upon internal motivations.
We’ve got the power
More so than other generations, we boomers were motivated by the following statements:
- Life is what I make of it.
- Make your life work for you.
- True beauty exists at all ages.
- Inner beauty is just as important as outer beauty.
- Beauty is making the most of what you got.
In conclusion, we American women are at a defining, empowering moment in history, said the authors. If marketers and business in general talk to us on our terms, we’ll listen, and we’ll buy.
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