Unfortunately, these stores are catering to a market that’s already on the decline. Based on U.S. census data, the number of Americans over sixty-five will more than double by the year 2035—as I said, it’s by far the fastest-growing segment of our population. There’s plenty of work ahead in making the world of retail better serve senior citizens. For our own sake, let’s hope some of that labor, too, is carried out with imagination and verve.
In fact, the time to begin that work is now. Let’s start small—by demanding better elevator music! I want to make my supermarket sojourns to the sounds of the Doors themselves, not 1001 Syrupy Strings’ version of “Light My Fire.” In fact, I can’t wait to join a senior citizen social center, where we’ll all prop ourselves up on our walkers and careen around the dance floor as the DJ spins the special fiftieth-anniversary edition of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack.
The aging eye is beginning to be felt in marketing. Mass merchandisers have built a pretty good franchise with older consumers in a few categories, including small appliances, hardware, automotive items and seasonal products. They’ve been much less successful in books, apparel, health-and-beauty aids and over-the-counter drugs. It’s not because older people don’t care about the written word or about wanting to look good. It’s certainly not because they don’t need pain relief or the occasional cough drop for an itchy throat. It might have something to do with the products themselves. The fashion world doesn’t seem to have grasped the fact that older people want stylish yet suitable clothing that fits.
At the same time, if you’re a guy like me, I’ll bet you don’t need any more stuff. The fifty-and-over crowd is generally downsizing, adjusting for empty nests and aging parents. Right now I own every shirt, tie, pair of shoes and piece of jewelry I foresee needing for the rest of my life. The only things I require are fruit, vegetables, pasta, wine, olive oil, meat and fish weekly, and annual doses of fresh socks and underwear. Everything else is discretionary (although my longtime live-in—who I call Dreamboat, because she is one—did surprise me two Christmases ago with a new gadget called a Slingbox, which hooks up to my cable TV and home Internet service, so now when I’m stranded in a hotel room in Singapore at two a.m., I can watch Yankees games on my laptop from my TV at home—pure heaven). Like most fifty-somethings, and with the notable exception of that Slingbox, which you’re not taking away from me, I’ll pick experiences over things any day. Plus a few pairs of socks.
I mentioned the brave new world of wheelchairs earlier, virgin territory that no one, to my knowledge, has staked out yet. These personal vehicles will surely receive a makeover, including souped-up engines, cruise control, lots of upholstery choices (will black leather be too hot in summer?), big tires like we had on our Jeeps back in the ’90s, cell phone chargers, cup holders, CD players and the appropriate bumper stickers (if this wheelchair’s a-rockin’ don’t come a-knockin’). There will be plenty of licensing opportunities, bringing brand names like Harley, BMW and John Deere (or Louis Vuitton, Chanel and Prada) to the marketplace. They won’t even be called wheelchairs—and in fact they’ll more closely resemble tractor mowers or three-wheeled motorcycles. These babies won’t even necessarily connote a handicap. They’ll just be cool conveniences, something for the geezer who has everything.
At the other end of the spectrum, it’s no secret that next to kids, old people are the biggest market for sneakers. Who else has a lifestyle that doesn’t ever require serious grown-up footwear? In fact, athletic gear—soft, rubber-soled shoes, baggy, open-necked shirts, loose pants with elastic waistbands—is tailor-made for the needs of aging fashion plates. Senior citizens have a lot more money to spend on sneakers than kids do and would gladly pay for features designed to bring extra comfort. Still, no self-respecting teenager wants to wear the same athletic shoes as Grandmom, which is probably why all those ads for Nike and Reebok feature youngsters rather than oldsters. Is there no way for a major athleticwear maker to target aged customers? I bet we’ll see it before long—it’ll just be too lucrative to miss. (Maybe the commercials will star the sixty-five-year-old Michael Jordan playing one-on-one with the twenty-first century’s premiere eight-foot center.)
There’s a similar question brewing over how the baby boomer fashion staple will age: Will kids buy the brand of jeans preferred by their grandparents? I’m assuming that we boomers will wear blue denim right up to the tomb (and why stop there?). But if it’s the uniform of the senility set, will anybody else dare touch it? Or will jeans go the way of fedoras?
The world of health and beauty aids now doesn’t pay enough attention to the older consumer, but it will have to in the future. There should be entire brands devoted to the needs of people over sixty-five, including special formulations of products for hair, skin, teeth, male grooming and cosmetics. Somebody is also going to have to figure out how to sell incontinence products to aging boomers. The current category—a few low-key brands of adult diapers sold sheepishly in the feminine hygiene aisle—isn’t going to cut it. Will it be Hanes, Calvin Klein, or Estée Lauder? Or will they be sold next to the extra-hold sports bras and athletic supporters?
The mattress store of the future will do well to specialize in selling to seniors. They’ll shop long and hard for bedding that’s ergonomically sound, and they’ll pay for it, too. From Tempur-Pedic to Sleep Number, mattresses will become more quasimedical products than home furnishings. The sleep category is booming. Even hotels are using their beds as a marketing engine for the aging, aching traveler.
When there aren’t so many kids afoot in America, the fast-food trade will have to redouble its efforts to keep senior citizen diners interested. They already make up a large part of the fast-food audience, without even being acknowledged beneath the golden arches. Someday it won’t be the latest Disney animation flick that gets the Burger King tie-in; it’ll be Rambo: The Nursing Home Insurgency. And instead of a Beanie Baby, the Happy Meal will come with a Hummel figurine.
When parents shop for clothing, toys, books and videos for their children, they usually know what size to get, or which favored plaything, or at what level the little one is reading. Thirty years from now, though, today’s parents will be buying for their grandchildren, and they’ll need a little guidance. Will clothing makers have wised up by then and created a sensible, standardized system of sizes? It’s chaos out there now, as anyone who shops for kiddie clothes knows. If such a system isn’t in place, stores will have to do whatever’s necessary—big, easy-to-read size charts, mannequins of different heights, lots of attentive salesclerks, all of the above—to ensure that grandparents can buy clothing with confidence.
If they can’t buy clothing, they’ll opt for toys or books or DVDs instead. But again, manufacturers and retailers have to make it easier than it is now. The appropriate reader’s age should be marked prominently on all kiddie and adolescent books. Same for videos and video games, too. Grandmom doesn’t want to accidentally buy Grand Theft Auto for her dear little five-year-old grandson, and she needs a hand to make sure she doesn’t.
Of course, we boomers are born technocrats, but who knows what new marvels will exist to intimidate us three decades from now? New technologies usually bring benefits that are perfectly suited to the older shopper: Internet shopping and e-mail make it easy if you can’t get around like you used to, and the pocket PCs of the future (like today’s BlackBerries and iPhones, only better) will have plenty of memory for the times when yours fails, like when you need a phone number or you’re standing in the middle of the supermarket and can’t remember why.
But look at how technology is marketed and sold—you’ll never see anybody over thirty in an ad or behind the counter of a store. And the product itself is unfriendly to older users, from the miniature keyboards to the type design on websites to the frequency with which printer and computer on-off switches are located in the back. Maybe some of high tech’s appeal is lost when it’s easy enough for your grandmother to use. But a couple decades down the road, when we
’re the grandmothers, there’s going to be hell to pay.
ELEVEN
Kids
With gender revolt (or reconfiguration, at the very least) having changed so much about our lives, and men and women off boldly shopping new terrain, the effect on children today is quite simple: Kids go everywhere.
Where did they ever go? To school, of course, which left their mothers free to perform the myriad tasks of the domestic superintendent, high among them the acquisition of food, groceries, clothing and other supplies and services as needed. Dad bought booze, tires, cigars, lawn-mowers, groceries (maybe once or twice a year) and Mom’s birthday gift. Banking was done by either mother or father, depending on the household’s particular division of labor. Only major purchases required the presence of the entire family, but how often did anyone get a car or a couch? Not so often that the children who came along for the ride required very much in the way of accommodation.
Today, both parents are almost certainly working at jobs, which means buying that cannot be done over lunch hours must take place during times the family might happily spend together. Shopping then becomes an acceptable leisure outing—less pleasurable, perhaps, than a week at Disney World, but not entirely without potential for fun, as we’ll see. Also, divorce is common enough that the single parent (either one) in the company of the brood is a common sight in movie theaters, restaurants and stores. On any given Saturday afternoon, is there a Cold Stone Creamery or game arcade in America that goes unvisited by divorced dads with their weekend-custody kids? Kids go everywhere because we take them, but once there, they alter the shopping landscape in both obvious and subtle ways.
The older we get, the more we recognize that the ownership of any product, no matter what it is, isn’t transformative. That dress, that lipstick, that iPod nano is not going to change you or anyone’s opinion of you. The aging consumer is also better at ignoring pop-up ads online and TiVo-ing their favorite programs so they don’t have to watch five annoying commercials in a row. Thus, the twenty-first-century marketer is focused on kids and teens. It’s no surprise to note that the average four-year-old American child can identify more than one hundred brands.
There is also the fact that our children consume even more mass media than we adults do, much of it vying to sell them things. The marketplace wants kids, needs kids, and kids are flattered by the invitation and happy to oblige. They idolize licensed TV characters the way their junior forebears once were taught to worship patron saints, and they manage to suss out the connection between brand name and status at a very early age. It’s just one more example of how capitalism brings about democratization—you no longer need to stay clear of the global marketplace just because you’re three and a half feet tall, have no income to speak of, and are not permitted to cross the street without Mom. You’re an economic force, now and in the future, and that’s what counts.
All this, like every major upheaval, is both boon and burden. In practical terms, it means three things:
1. That if a store is somehow unwelcoming to children, parent shoppers will get the message and stay away. I can’t tell you how many stores that depend on female customers fail to ensure that all aisles and paths between racks and fixtures are wide enough for a baby stroller to pass. If they’re not, at least half of all women in their twenties and thirties will be shut out at least some of the time. (A great many men shoppers will be, too.) We did a job for a department store and determined, using a tape measure, that the baby and children’s clothing section was more crowded with racks and fixtures than any other part of the store. As a result, it was the most difficult part of the store to navigate if you were pushing a stroller; it was also the least-visited section of the store, which was no coincidence. Every year, Hallmark spends a small fortune on TV commercials for the Christmas ornament sections of its stores. In one prototype store we studied, the fixture sat on a narrow aisle. Every time a shopper with a stroller ventured there, the section was totally blocked off. As a result, our research showed, only 10 percent of the store’s shoppers ever saw the ornaments. By store design and fixturing alone you determine whether you will be kid-friendly or kid-avoidant: Automatic doors, wide aisles and no steps make it easy on parents pushing prams or dragging (or chasing) toddlers.
2. That children can be counted on to be enthusiastic consumers (or co-consumers) as long as their needs have been considered. In other words, if you want to sell something to kids, you’ve got to put it where they can see it and reach it. That goes for obvious items, like bubble bath in an Arthur-shaped container, but also for things like dog treats, as I explained in an earlier chapter, since children (along with old people) are the main market for liver-flavored cookies. Conversely, if you don’t childproof the store the way you would your home, you’ll be in for many unhappy surprises.
3. That if the parent’s sustained close attention is required (by, say, a car salesman or a bank loan officer), then someone must first find a way to divert the attention of a restless, bored child.
The first time I paid practical attention to the effect of children on the “adult” world was not in any retail emporium but in a temple of culture, the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia. I was wandering among the great one’s larger-than-life bronzes, lost in aesthetic reverie, when I heard a young voice exclaim, “Look, Mom—a bottom!” I turned to see an angelic tyke gripping with both little hands the buttocks of Balzac.
I then gazed around the room and noticed that there were touch marks on all the statues, roughly at the height where this adorable child had grabbed poor old Honoré. Clearly, this little fellow was not the only touch-oriented art connoisseur in America.
That moment illustrated several truths about children. First, they are exuberant participants in the world of objects. If it is within their reach and it offers even the slightest inducement, they will touch it. A child’s creative impulse is expressed in his or her search for the essential toy-ness in everything, from the most mundane objects to the loftiest. An ironing board? That’s a toy. Balzac’s butt cheeks? They’re a toy, too. I realized that if you want children to touch something, you must only put it low enough, and they will find it. In fact, objects placed below a certain point will be touched by children only.
Supermarkets have been at the forefront of exploiting the hands-on shopping style of children. We have countless videotape moments showing kids in grocery stores begging, coaxing, whining, imploring Mom or Dad to choose some item (and when that fails, simply grabbing it and tossing it into the cart). If it’s within their reach, they will touch it, and if they touch it, there’s at least a chance that Mom or Dad will relent and buy it, Dad especially. Even this must be done with care, though—we once studied a market that had placed products with kid appeal on the bottom shelf, not realizing that for children riding in shopping carts, the shelf just below the middle one is ideal.
Supermarkets have gotten so good at appealing to children that parents are in semirevolt. In response to complaints about the candy and gum racks by the cashiers, some markets have begun to offer candy-free checkouts. (Now the confectioners are complaining.) We found an alarming trend in a study a few years back: a growing number of parents who assiduously steer clear of the cookie and cracker aisle in order to spare themselves the predictable youthful hue and cry. To counter that maneuver, our cookie manufacturer client began securing strategic adjacencies—with appropriate aisle partners (cookies on one side of the aisle and baby food on the other, for example) to guarantee that one way or another, families will have to confront chocolate chips.
In the ’80s, General Mills devised a new product for callow palates: a microwave popcorn that came in different colors. They advertised the stuff heavily on kiddie TV, but then—in a classic example of the merchandising hand not knowing what the marketing hand was doing—failed to make sure it was being displayed within reach of its intended consumers. In fact, assuming that parents would do the buying, the firm’s typical supermarket planogram had positioned it on
the high side, and this, we felt sure, was to blame for the product’s disappointing sales. We still show clients the video of a boy of six or so making repeated flying leaps at the shelf where the popcorn was kept, trying to knock one to the floor so he could show it to Mom. He finally got it down, but his mother refused to allow it in the cart. Dejectedly, he put it back on the shelf—not where it had been, but down at his eye level. And sure enough, the next kid who came by saw it, grabbed it and tossed it into Dad’s cart, where it remained. A classic moment in the wisdom of watching the shopper.
It would be almost impossible for families to shop together if not for the advent of kid-friendly dining, and McDonald’s, more than anyone, has prospered from this—the restaurants are part convenience, part bribery for the little citizens if only they’ll behave through a morning at the mall. McDonald’s realized early on that if it could appeal to children—through its menu but also with the toys and licensed character cups and playlands—it would get the parents as well. It’s no coincidence that America’s dominant fast food is also the favorite among kids. But even McDonald’s doesn’t get everything right. One glaring omission: The counters are all too high for children to use. A seven-or eight-year-old is certainly capable of going alone from table to counter to order more fries or another soda. But the design of the restaurants forbids it. Even the menu boards are so high that only an adult can comfortably see them. There should be kid-level menus that employ large photos of the food and as few words as possible.
Why We Buy Page 17
