Communicating More Effectively With The 37+ Markets

Other business costs are falling while marketing costs are rising. Yet, response rates to many traditional marketing and sales techniques are off. There is growing impatience with a function of business that is costing more, delivering less and resists accountability. In addition,baby boomer and older consumers (37+) are the wealthiest, best educated and most sophisticated of purchasers and marketing and sales communications are not creating motivating communications, effective sales presentations and service improvement programs to better capture and keep these consumers. A Coopers and Lybrand study found in a study of 100 leading companies that marketing departments tend to be "ill-focused and over-indulged" with department heads who "overstated their contribution to the company, but could not specify what the nature of the contribution was." A 1995 McKinsey report somberly warned, "Doubts are surfacing about the very basis of contemporary marketing." The report charged marketing departments with generating "few new ideas," being "unimaginative," and failing to "pick up the right signals." Finally, Kevin Clancy and Robert Shulman, both formerly with consumer researcher Yankelovich Clancy Shulman predict a marketing revolution "because failure is self-evident and everybody -- stockholders, directors, CEOs, customers, the government -- is angry because marketing, which should be driving business, doesn't work."Now that the adult median age is in the mid-40s and continuing to rise, pressure is building on bank marketing and sales to learn how to better market to a dominantly older consumer population. Though we don't notice it happening -- any more than a child notices that he has grown an inch taller during the summer -- changes take place across our full life span in how information is processed by our brains (which process information sent to it by the five senses) and the mind (where thinking takes place). How a 30-year-old mind processes the contents of a commercial, print ad or direct mail piece will be markedly different from how a 50- or 60-year-old mind processes the same information. Is there literature or other information available to help bank marketers communicate more effectively with the 37+ markets?