Rebranding Aging: the next chapter by G. Richard Ambrosius, MA, and Helen Foster

The emergence in 1989 of the “new customer majority”—adults ages 50 and older today—left advertisers and marketers up the proverbial creek with no paddle to guide them back to the mainstream consumer population. From an advertising and marketing perspective, this shift meant everything learned about consumer behavior quickly became irrelevant. Texts for these professions were all written to target the young that had ruled the marketplace for decades. The behavior of the youth markets of yesterday, however, was much different from that of the older consumers who now are the adult majority.