Wild ones: Brands still in dark on how to reach over-65s

Brands are being offered another chance to get under the skin of the over-65s, a lucrative audience with more time, more money and more purchasing power than any other generation but who still feel brands simply do not understand them.

BBH London has launched an ethnographic study, which highlights the attitudes, interests and desires of older people and offers advice on how brands can best tap into the often misunderstood demographic.

While organisations such as Saga have been tapping this rich vein of wealth for decades, most brands have yet to recognise this potential goldmine, with BBH’s Silver Culture project aiming to help the advertising and marketing industry address its biggest blind spot.

The study follows research by media agency The Kite Factory, published last year, which claimed the industry’s continuing obsession with Gen Z and Millennial consumers is alienating the most lucrative generation of the over-65s, who neither value nor enjoy advertising when compared to younger people.

With many brands cutting off their segmentation at age 65 or even earlier, and agencies rarely seeing briefs focused on older people, the BBH project aims to shatter the monoculture of “old”, perpetuated by the industry, help unlock the silver pound and raise awareness of silver culture.

Carried out over two years, it has resulted in an in-depth insight into silver culture for marketers. Sampling was carried out among those aged 65-80, to create a segment comparable to Gen Zs, Millennials, and Gen X, while an insights panel survey was carried out among 500 over 65s in the UK, recruited from a national representative framework. Further, immersive research was carried out among a group of 20 people aged 60-80, featuring in-depth interviews, home tours and ‘show and tells’.

Key learnings from the research include how today’s over-65s see the “third act” of their lives as a time of liberation, purpose and the chance to try something new, with many feeling more confident than ever in both their bodies and identities.

They also want brands to be less earnest and try to get to know them better – three-quarters (73%) don’t feel that marketers or brands understand them or their desires.

BBH senior strategist Jessica Garlick said: “We want our industry to be as obsessed with silver culture as we are with youth culture.

“The over-65s hold most of the UK’s wealth and offer businesses the opportunity for growth that young people once did. The Silver Culture Project is about understanding this lucrative audience better, and looks to help us challenge our assumptions about who our brands are for.”