Baby Boomers

Target Audience

            The baby boomers, Americans between 38 and 56 years old, comprise the largest demographic group of consumers.1  As this group ages, marketers adapt their products and services to fit the generation’s changing needs.  Yet first, marketers must understand the baby boomers’ values, lifestyle and spending habits.
The 38 to 56 year olds value appearance, health, children and grandchildren, education and retirement.2  Holding on to their looks becomes more important to this generation each year.  “What’s different with Boomers,” compared to other age demographic segments, “is how passionately they refuse to concede anything to age.”3 
Baby boomers want to stay healthy until the very end of their days.  Strong health allows people to partake in more activities than the less healthy. Baby boomers want the ability to continue to travel, play sports and enjoy a high quality of life well into their elder years.
This generation also believes in the importance of family.  They talk for hours each week to their children and grandchildren over the phone.  They buy plane tickets or make the long drives to enjoy the holidays with family.  They even financially sponsor their children and grandchildren by funding school expenses for private school and college.4  Being a grandchild has never been better. 
  Lastly, baby boomers invest and plan for retirement.  Value is placed on IRAs, 401ks, stocks and mutual funds.5  They realize saving money will insure the means for a comfortable retirement.
Baby boomers follow a revitalizing, fast-paced and proactive lifestyle.6  “Boomers appear to be trying to create new model of adulthood, a midlife life stage focused on renewal.”7  The generation frequents the athletic club.  They lift weights, practice aerobics, swim, play tennis, snow ski and participate in yoga.  Baby boomers enjoy working out and know it will keep them healthy and feeling young. 
The divorced 40 to 50 year olds also want to stay in the dating game that they dominated for the last 20 years.  Boomers employ the use of “sexual performance enhancing drugs, skin care creams and color treatments.”8  They will do almost anything to revitalize their active lifestyle.
Well into their 40s and 50s, this generation controls the professional world.  Many do not plan on early retirement; they love their job too much.  Baby boomers emerge as the first generation to contain a large segment of women professionals.  Both males and females live busy, hard working lives that do not slow down with age.9
            This demographic group fights for causes, analyzes issues and lives by principles.  Baby boomers strive to make educated, responsible choices.  They find out the right thing to do and then do it.
            Even more than values and lifestyles, marketers want to know what baby boomers spend their money on.  As responsible decisions makers, this generation invests for their own retirement and for the education of their children and grandchildren.  In contrast, they also splurge billions of dollars a year on the clothes, toys and activities for their grandchildren.10
            Baby boomers and the rest of America will use an estimated $30 billion on modern day versions of the fountain of youth.11  Some examples of these products that focus on making them look or feel younger include liposuction, plastic surgery, make up, tanning products, vitamin supplements, aerobics and adventure vacations.
            The 38 to 56 year olds will be spending more of their money on health, appearance, and children and grandchildren.  Products and services that apply to these areas will see increased sales in the next couple decades.  A marketer who knows the consumer buyer behavior will appeal to the values and lifestyles of the baby boomers.