As Baby Boomers begin to turn 65, Generation Reinvention IS Changing Aging

Below I've provided some conclusions from my newest book, Generation Reinvention: How Boomers Today Are Changing Business, Marketing, Aging and the Future. This 279-page book explores a growing body of research, arguments, insights, and speculation over how Boomers are impacting aging and commerce. Implications from my book are monetary and personal, local and international, intergenerational and multicultural. To learn why these conclusions are significant for your work and future, you can get a copy from online book retailers, including Amazon. Thank you for following my blog and, of course, your interest in Generation Reinvention.

 

AGING is a nonnegotiable part of the human condition, a biological imperative that binds, beckons, and bothers. Aging begets elderhood.

These are facts, immutable.

Also undeniable is flexibility of meaning about human aging: social, cultural, and institutional narratives remain malleable.

At this point it must be obvious that a provocative generation is marshalling its population dominance, economic force, and propensities for transformation, and then spearheading constructive change in business, culture, and society. In tandem with the Silent Generation, Boomers are addressing, edifying, and even attacking conceptions of aging, not biological constants but rather sociological and psychological context.

Implications are far-reaching, but here are some of the salient:

1. Boomers embody immense market potential for products and services typically associated with aging, but they expect features, benefits, and branding to address their styles and evolving sensibilities.

2. This generation also constitutes a compelling market for consumables, durable goods, and services traditionally thought of as the domain of youth markets.

3. Their online and traditional media habits are counterintuitive. They watch, listen to and read mass media in persuasive numbers.

4. Boomers sometimes over-represent emerging market segments reflecting the contemporary zeitgeist, such as Lifestyles of Health & Sustainability (LOHAS).

5. They are actively inventing myriad new businesses, large and small, that satisfy innermost impulses for reinvention and control.

6. The generation is vigorously changing conventional commercial thinking around aging, inspiring marketing and advertising campaigns that elevate rather than diminish.

7. Boomer hegemony over popular culture continues as generational icons and thought leaders create modern stories about aging and wisdom, portrayed with panache through television, movies, books, theater, and music.

8. Baby Boomer men are searching for greater meaning and opportunities in later life, and their quest creates stirring prospects for businesses, nonprofits, and institutions, as well as strong potential for new products and services.

Generation Reinvention is changing aging, so much so that some of these changes may only become obvious through the lens of historical reflection. But fifty years from now, as pundits and scholars reexamine this time and assess the final few decades of the post-World War II generation, I believe they will be kind in their critiques.

There will be tribulations along the winding path to greater age inclusiveness and lifelong engagement. There will be serious decisions for companies, communities and individuals to consider. Fundamental social changes do not come easily and never have.

But possible disadvantages of so many Boomers growing old simultaneously can be addressed, negotiated, and rendered manageable. In their wisdom, Boomers and older generations will search for optimum balance between life extension, long-lasting social and economic engagement, and inevitable dissolution. This generation will reinvent itself. Social, political, economic, and cultural implications are mostly encouraging.

Generation Reinvention is personal, community, institutional, business, economic, social, and political reinvention — a menu of extraordinary opportunities for those who understand the implications and embrace a reasoned and realistic vision of the future.

Comments

[wholesale flea market items]

One feature of Boomers was that they tended to think of themselves as a special generation, very different from those that had come before. In the 1960s, as the relatively large numbers of young people became teenagers and young adults, they, and those around them, created a very specific rhetoric around their cohort, and the change they were bringing about.This rhetoric had an important impact in the self perceptions of the boomers, as well as their tendency to define the world in terms of generations, which was a relatively new phenomenon.

[Healthy Aging]

"Their online and traditional media habits are counterintuitive. They watch, listen to and read mass media in persuasive numbers."

I still sometime cannot believe the way media markets to us. People really need to start waking up to the reality of "our" generation taking on aging rather than the other way around.

I own a BB, I have an online social life (Twitter, Facebook, LinkeIn) as do most of my friends. This attitude of replacing boomer with "senior" needs to be booted out the window!

Cheers
Samantha

[Samantha]

Boomers are definitely going to be the generation that redefine "aging".

"Baby Boomer men are searching for greater meaning and opportunities in later life, and their quest creates stirring prospects for businesses, nonprofits, and institutions, as well as strong potential for new products and services."

I read somewhere the other day that almost 80% of boomers turning 50 (in 2010) expected to work into their 80's! I can even see that as a possibility for me.

The influx of boomers entering middle age and beyond will be refreshing and we hopefully will get a better, healthier aging lifestyle.

Here's wishing us all a happy, healthy 2011,
Sam

[firstSTREET]

Certainly the baby boomers have wielded great influence in our society both as a voting body and parents. Now that they are reaching retirement age, the traditional meanings of aging and retirement are being redefined, as you alluded to. Great post, thanks for sharing!