Marketing to Older Consumers

Marketers interested in designing effective strategies to tap the increasingly lucrative mature market presently must look for relevant information in several disciplines and need the background to translate it into a decision-making framework. This book systematically organizes information scattered among various fields of scientific inquiry; it interprets and presents information, making it easier for the busy decision maker to find out how older consumers behave and why. By presenting and interpreting relevant information in a marketing decision-making context, the book provides the bases for developing effective marketing strategies. Next, the author discusses both specific and general aspects of behavior that have implications for marketing strategy. Specifically, the book helps the reader understand how changes in mental processes in late life might affect the way an older person responds to marketing stimuli, and how lifestyles of mature persons can form the bases for designing effective marketing strategies. Finally, the author discusses specific aspects of older consumers' consumption and behavior in the marketplace, including mass media use, expenditure and consumption patterns, shopping habits, product/service acquisition process, as well as behaviors following purchase. At the end of each chapter, the author outlines several implications of the material presented that will be of interest to marketers, retailers, advertisers, social workers, public policy makers, and students of human behavior. The book ends by summarizing key points, drawing conclusions, and making recommendations to various groups interested in serving the mature market. The results of hundreds of studies are reviewed and presented in such a way that they can be used by practitioners. The book begins with an examination of the older consumer market and its characteristics. Age-related changes in late life and theoretical explanations for them are discussed next to help the reader understand human behavior in general and consumer behavior in particular.