Stop focusing on retirement homes and cruises when marketing to older Australians, health expert says
Marketers are misunderstanding Australia’s aging population and missing opportunities as a result, Tonic Health Media founder Norman Swan has warned.
“People are staying younger longer, and marketers are missing this. They are focusing on retirement villages and cruises and things like that,” Swan told the Mumbrella Health Marketing Summit.
Swan says marketers are missing the fact mature Australians consider themselves young until their final years.
Swan, who is also the host of ABC Radio National’s Health Report, said today’s older consumers don’t consider themselves ‘old’ and the stereotypical market view of a aged customer is really only applicable to the last stages of one’s life.
“These people are young and they are young until the five years before they die and they don’t see themselves as old.
“I don’t think we’ve designed the marketing messages for this cohort of people – we tend to think of ‘old people’s products’ rather than the fact someone is going to stay quite young and active until their 80s.”
Swan advised marketers that consumers want more control over their lives and that control in itself is leading to longer, healthier lives.
That desire for control though can manifest itself in perverse ways for marketers, Swan warned, citing the anti-vaxxer community as an example of health consumers talking control of their family’s health outcomes.
“It’s quite a subtle way that you market control to people. A doctor can say ‘this drug is 3,000 times safer than going out and crossing the road’, that won’t compute because people know they’re in control when they cross the road and will be really unlucky if they get swiped. Whereas they have no control over what a doctor prescribes them.”
“There’s much more nuance and people are much more paranoid. When you ask people why they don’t get their kids immunised its because they think there’s a plot and the plot has been the pharmaceutical companies and the doctors denying the truth.”
Looking to the future, Swan said he expects alcohol and sugar will be the next battlegrounds for health conscious consumers and marketers now that smoking has fallen out of fashion. However that shift too is an opportunity for brands, he believes.
“Supermarkets and manufacturers don’t lose any money out of this because they just shift. If you take Coca-Cola Amatil, they have plenty of sugar free drinks to be able to sell. They actually make the same amount of money.”
