Today’s post is by a friend and renowned aging expert, David Wolfe. It is a continuation of I’m Listening, which was posted on April 23, 2007.

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The term “age gap” is a commonly used label. Another label that can be linked to age gap is perception gap. A perception gap exists when two people seeing the same thing assign different meanings to it. This can happen as a result of differences in education, cultural background, experience or native intelligence. Negative biases against aging also contribute to age perception gaps – something that is commonplace among people in marketing who have yet to hit the half-century mark.The age gap between the average-age marketer and the average-age adult customer appears to be widening. The problem of age-rooted perception gaps in marketing costs companies billions of dollars annually. Many older customers are turned off by advertising that either panders to them of that extols the virtues of youth over age.. This is the foundation of the anti-aging personal products business. Recently however, Dove has come out with a Pro-aging line of personal products. My betting is that it is going to be as much a success as the earlier launched Real Beauty campaign that featured women of all ages, shapes and sizes.Companies annually spend over $200 billion in the U.S. annually in advertising and untold billions more in marketing consulting and other marketing support services and products. Were the costs of the age-rooted perception in marketing subjected to serious research, I would not be surprised to see the tally adding up to tens of billions of dollars annually. How so? If what marketers think what customers need, want and respond to is significantly out of sync with what customers actually need, want and will respond to, a marketing perception gap exists.

As the adult median age rises, the age-rooted perception gap widens. According to a survey made not long ago, the average age of advertising agency account representatives is 28. [i] That is about the same as it has been for years. It means that the average account executive is 18 years younger than the current adult median age of 46, and over a quarter a century younger than most of the 44 percent of adults who are 50 and older.

Many, including my self in my book Ageless Marketing, have documented a steep decline in marketing productivity in recent years. This was quite pronounced in the 1990s, the decade in which adults 40 and older became the adult customer majority. In looking for the causes of the problems in marketing it only makes sense to look for any causative forces stemming from an aging marketplace that have contributed to problems in marketing effectiveness. Having studied this issue over the course of more than two decades, I have no doubt that a large portion of the problems in marketing can be attributed to a widening age perception gap caused by a the widening gap between the average age of marketers and the average age of adult consumers.

No doubt some young researchers and marketers – and even some older ones, too – will consider my remarks on this subject to be condescending. They are not. They simply reflect the empirically validated fact that people of markedly different ages tend to perceive things differently, from the fantastical perceptions of children and the dramatic perceptions of teens to the objective black and white perceptions of young adults and the “shades of gray” perceptions of older adults.

Few 28-year-olds would have a problem seeing in themselves considerable changes in the way they see things from how they saw things when they were 18-years-old.

Reflect on how a typical 16-year-old high school student sees a 30-year-old. The 30-year-old is too old to remember being a teen, so as youth cautioned one another other in the 1960s, “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” Students chanted that mantra on campuses across the nation. The 8 to 12 years before most of them would celebrate their 30^th birthdays seemed a long time in the future. People over 30 belonged to another generation.

To a 28-year-old ad account executive, age 50 seems just as remote generation-wise. For that reason, a 30-year-old marketer working in 50-plus markets is working beyond the boundaries of his or her natural ability to perceive sharp difference between people in those older markets. They are all seniors – one big homogenous mass of old people. Education and training can help remedy the problem, which is why we italicized natural ability. However, few people under age 40 have received any training in how older consumers perceive, think and make decisions. The result is, messages for customers in the second half of life more often than not are executed in a style better suited to customers in the first half of life.

In the final post in this series I will answer the question, “What is a generation, anyhow?”

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[i] James Surowiecki, “Ageism in Advertising, The New Yorker, 1 Apr. 2002, p.40.

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