The Importance of Women Including Older Women

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Last week I returned to Dublin to talk at the Business of Ageing Conference. More details about the conference in future posts.

One of the points that I mentioned was the importance of older women as consumers and their influence on major purchase decisions. Also, I talked about the fact that women seem to ‘do’ getting older better than men. Yep, I know it is a huge generalization but that has been my experience in working in the ageing business for the last 6 years.

Of all the things I mentioned this generated the most questions. So rather than respond to all of the e-mails individually I thought I would write a blog posting listing some of my information sources.

First books. If you are interested in marketing to the older women then I recommend you look at:

Primetime Women – Marti Barletta

Boom – Mary Brown and Carol Orsborn

What Boomer Women 50+ Know, Think, Do and Buy – Stephen Reily and Carol Orsborn

I know I have missed out a couple of other excellent books but that will be something to be getting on with.

For the factlets that appeared in my presentation.

This gives the data about the split of older and younger women using Facebook. Like all of this research it is indicative rather than accurate to the last decimal place.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch Global Research have done a lot to look at the spending power and attitude of women and older women in particular. I like the terminology – they have created a “long-on-women” investment opportunity.

Have a read of this and this to give you more details.

Nielsen is making a lot of use of the BCG (Boston Consulting Group) research that showed that the vast majority of new income growth over the next ten years will come from women and makes the bold assertion that women influence 65% of the world’s annual consumer spending.

All of this leads to a simple bottom line. Ignore older women (and younger ones) at your peril. When constructing a strategy to address the older market you had better make sure that the mindset of the women is core to your thinking.

Image by: Ulrica (@Ullie)

Original Post: http://20plus30.blogspot.com/2011/03/importance-of-women-including-older.html