Boomers

Will Retiring Boomers Bust Stock and Bond Markets?

This blog post presents a retrospective on 2006 media coverage stirred up by the so-named, former "Junk Bond King" Michael Milken and Wharton Professor Jeremy Siegel. They predicted collapse of the U.S. stock and bond markets due to Boomer retirements. How prescient were they? Judge for yourself. 

Michael Milken and Jeremy Siegel have a couple of things in common. Possessing sufficient personal retirement wealth is the first.

In spite of his nefarious reputation as the "junk bond king," a convicted felon for securities and mail fraud, Milken clearly has squirreled away enough money to cover his nut (with an estimated net worth of over $3.7 billion in 2020). Siegel, a tenured finance professor at Wharton, will never face the potential indignity of being a Wal-Mart greeter late in life.

The other commonality is their focus on the possible financial collapse of stock and bond markets when Boomers cash out of more risky investments to fund conservative retirement allocations and late-life expenses.

Siegel correctly warns that “the aging population is the most critical issue facing the developed world.” He observes that in 1950 life expectancy vs. retirement age were 1.6 years apart: age 69 vs. 67, respectively. The gap today is 14.5 years. To reverse this trend and slim down the period that the average Boomer might spend in retirement, one option is for the average retirement age to increase from 62 today to 73 or 74 in the future. In this scenario, people will work, on the average, 10 to 12 years longer.

However, he recommends an alternative strategy. The non-Western world is younger than the developed world, especially the U.S., Europe and Japan, so “we embed in a global economy, (and) we can sell assets to a developing world (and) they can ship us goods.” The elderly in developed countries trade their savings for goods produced by the young in developing countries.

Milken, who has remade himself as a major philanthropist, contributing millions to cancer research and public health organizations, further observes that there are two noteworthy demographic trends today. The first is a growing middle class in developing nations, such as India (thanks, in part, to the off-shoring of so many U.S. technology and customer support jobs). The other is an aging population in the developed world.

The very good news to Milken is longevity. Men, for example, have gained 12 relatively healthy years during the last 20, from a life expectancy of 60 to over 72. “We’re living longer and more productive lives, so we’re going to want to work longer.”

Working longer means we’ll produce more products and services to sell worldwide (and be less likely to liquidate the assets we have), so we won’t need to trade our assets (retirement investments in stocks and bonds) for goods and services. The nation will produce more goods and services for an increasingly materialistic world.

This all seems rather naïve. According to a gloomy story in U.S. News & World Report, "Forty-one percent of workers ages 45 to 54 have less than $25,000 saved up for retirement." Further, neither pundit addresses the human resources side of a nation risking deep recessions because of Boomer longevity and corresponding market lassitude. Quite the contrary, the most threatening issue of our time is longstanding ageism in corporate America.

For two decades, many Boomers have confronted the career turmoil of outsourcing and off-shoring. They are your neighbors and former colleagues who now methodically dispatch “youthified” resumes to online job sites, network in mastermind groups, and sometimes admit defeat to become now-and-again consultants. Some end up measuring your inseam for a new suit or steaming you a latte. Some do both in a single day. (These victims of globalization and the breakdown of loyalty between companies and workers do not include someone who made a fortune selling junk bonds or a professor shrouded in tenure.)

The Boomer Generation has been an abundant human resources goldmine that has enriched this nation’s corporations for decades. The most educated generation in history has augmented the nation's economic competitiveness, both as creators of wealth and aggressive consumers. For the last several years, this gift of inventiveness, industry and consumerism has been rewarded with bankruptcies of pension funds, widespread layoffs, and movement of blue- and then white-collar jobs overseas.

Siegel sees further globalization as the salve. Milken believes longer, healthier American lives will logically lead to longer careers. Both offer incomplete solutions.

If Mr. Milken and Professor Siegel wish to see this nation securer from financial upheaval due to a market exodus by aging Boomers, then they need to focus on how the business community can change longstanding discriminatory practices, including disengaging older workers mid-career and providing too few new opportunities for meaningful and secure employment in later life.

We won’t find satisfying and highly remunerative work if our jobs continue to relocate overseas. We can’t work if corporations don’t learn to value and employ older workers beyond low-paying service jobs.

Postscript: In September 2020, 40 percent of Boomers had retired according to Pew Research Center. On March 7, 2021, the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 306.14 points, or 1%, to reach a new record of 31,802.44.

P.P.S. In 2014 during a speech to the Canadian financial services industry, I addressed how Boomers+ transform industries to defy the gloomiest predictions about the impact of their aging. Take a look. 

 

A Gift for the Boomers in Your Life

Much of today's successful citizen engagement has been influenced by the late-1960s and early-1970s. Fifty years ago, motivated college and university students from the Boomer generation molded the strategies and tactics of modern democratic mobilization.

Cause-related activism and protest demonstrations are fundamental to the success of The American Story. Citizens have been assembling and speaking truth to power for over 244 years. Promoting constructive change is central to the nation’s DNA. Boomers added their passionate voices to the refrain for “a more perfect union,” a chorus that rings especially true in the context of a complicated and deadly 2020.

Noble Chaos: A Novel by Brent Green reveals deeper insights into the struggles and successes of impassioned young people. Set at the University of Kansas in 1969 and 1970, a riveting story begins when a firebomb demolishes the student center, inciting campus unrest and a deadly confrontation between protesters and authorities over the Vietnam War.

Interesting characters amplify the struggles and victories of a youth cohort encountering extraordinary pressures to conform and yet to resist conformity.

This book taps into the generation’s nostalgic reflections as well as their unprecedented experiences of reaching young adulthood during the most unpopular foreign war in the nation’s history.

Noble Chaos showcases how members of the Boomer generation constructively improved the nation, bringing their lived realities more in synch with the nation’s most coveted values for freedom, peaceful coexistence, and inclusion.

This coming-of-age novel is available in print, for Kindle, and as an audiobook on Audible. Last-minute shoppers may order digital versions with instantaneous delivery.

Your favorite Boomer could be taking a trip back to 1969 tonight.

 

The Problem with Baby Boomers and “Free” Offers in Advertising

We consumers are inundated with offers of free products and services. Just turn on your television and wait until the next commercial break. Chances are some company will offer you something for free. The irony is that most of these offers are disingenuous and manipulative.

As Robert Heinlein popularized in his 1966 science-fiction novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, “There is no such thing as a free lunch.”

Other than promotional offers designed to generate leads, when a company gives targeted consumers something in exchange for identifying personal information, most ads proposing a free-something-or-other are discounts. We give the company money and the company gives us something back as a value-added incentive … that’s paid for with our money.

Baby Boomers have been at the epicenter of marketing since they were in diapers. Trillions have been spent. Every marketing ploy that the human imagination can conceive has been tried, and tried, and tried. We are sophisticated consumers—and jaded. We know lunch and dinner are not free.

I could suggest dozens of examples of misleading free offers, but a mass-market TV ad caught my attention and serves as a case-in-point of how to create a cloying "free" ad:

When I learned the copywriter’s craft, the rule-of-thumb was that a 30-second TV commercial allowed for no more than 70 words of announcer copy, at the outside. More copy shoehorned into thirty seconds makes the ad frenetic, busy, car-dealer like. Less verbiage is usually better, especially when targeting older adults.

The advertising agency for Golden Corral restrained themselves by limiting narrated copy to 86 piping-hot, world-famous words. Additionally, the commercial uses the spoken word “free” five times. The free offer is also presented twice visually.

I guess they get their point across, and anyone paying attention has a brighter day knowing that he will get six free “piping hot delicious yeast rolls” to take home after consuming the legendary dinner buffet for one low price. The offer requires purchase of two adult dinner buffets, communicated in squint type on-screen for 1.6 seconds. A few perceptive viewers may notice, but the offer restriction conveniently appears twice in case we blink and miss it the first time.

I assume that Golden Corral paid a significant budget allocation for production of this television commercial. And it shows. The food videography is top-notch. Depicted buffet items are all-American “comfort foods,” including crispy fried chicken. The piping hot delicious yeast rolls do look piping hot as they appear from an oven in small batches. Happy customers, including possibly a Boomer mom, do indeed look happy.

Cinematography aside, Golden Corral has conceived another free offer that isn’t free; it‘s cloying, especially to this jaded Boomer consumer. And I think the ad must be annoying to others in my generational cohort who also learned from Mom and Dad that there are no free lunches.

Some viewers will be annoyed by the misuse and overuse of the word free. This is exacerbated by one of the most abused combination of words in the English language: “absolutely free.”

From a grammatical standpoint, something is free or it isn’t. “Absolutely” is superfluous, but copywriters have called upon this brassy adverb to add force to the overused promise of free everything. The next generation of copywriters may be forced to embolden their faux free offers with “absolutely, unrestrictedly, totally, utterly, and positively FREE.”

Other viewers will be annoyed by the nutritional truth of “piping hot delicious yeast rolls.” While this ad visually portrays something wholesome and yummy, in reality these rolls appear to be made from white flour, and the recipe probably includes doses of sugar and/or honey and some kind of mystery fat. Boomers today are becoming more nutritionally conscious as many struggle with being overweight or obese (allegedly 40 percent or more). White flour and sugar are two dastardly culprits contributing to modern diet-related diseases.

The “big idea” behind this ad probably came from a corporate marketing person or team nurturing dreams of industry acclaim. Imagine all the handsomely paid marketing folks and their ad agency colleagues getting excited about this breakthrough advertising strategy. This is how legendary reputations get built.

The offer strategy and copy certainly passed through many layers of approval but still reek of formulaic inexperience.

So what might be effective with Boomer consumers? First, and in a word, authenticity. B. Joseph Pine II and Jim Gilmore have written an excellent treatise on the importance of authentic branding and marketing today. 

What could be more authentic to Boomers than six free piping hot delicious yeast rolls? There are many possibilities, but one is an offer that embraces grandchildren.

Comfort food has its appeal to all of us, diets notwithstanding. Including the grandkids makes dining there all the more enticing. In addition to showcasing warm-fuzzy buffet food, Golden Corral could portray charming and motivating glimpses of authentic engagement between generations over dinner. Authentic food. Authentic family connections. If the marketing situation demands a motivating response kicker, then Golden Corral can offer a value-added incentive especially for the grandkids. 

Seasoned copywriters — those who have been engaged in the craft for decades, not merely months or years — have attuned their judgment to understanding the differences between fake and authentic portrayals of clients’ products and services. They stopped depending on outdated copywriting formulas such as nauseating repetition of the word “free,” especially when the free offer is a value-added discount or bonus for purchasing something.

There is no free lunch, and there are no shortcuts to reaching Boomers today. It takes maturity, sophistication, and deeper consumer insights. This does not come by believing ad industry mythology that offering something free is the only direct and certain path to the consumer’s heart ... or stomach.

Dr. Mark Crooks, A 57-Year Cancer Survivor, A Life Dedicated to Showing Adults How to Age Well

Brent Green has written and published a biographical novel inspired by Dr. Mark Crooks, his long-time friend and fitness mentor, entitled: WARRIOR: The Life and Lessons of a Man Who Beat Cancer for 57 Years. His buddy died ten years ago, on July 8, 2010, and this is Brent's tribute to Mark and his lasting impact. 

Mark Crooks, PhD, an exercise physiologist, sports psychologist, fitness pioneer and daredevil, risked everything to survive five bouts of cancer spanning 57 years. 

The stony truck driver was exhausted following his overnight drive from Chicago to Kansas City. He had kept himself awake by drinking a thermos full of coffee and taking several No-Doz. His eyes burned from staring at dark, isolated highways. Even morning chatter on his radio did not perk him up for the final leg of his long haul to Salina, Kansas.

His eighteen-wheeler raced across the Paseo Bridge spanning the Missouri River. The weary driver ignored a crudely hand-lettered sign held by one of Dr. Mark Crooks’ assistants. The sign demanded: Slow Down, Jumper Ahead.

A warning sign about a jumper threatening to hurl himself into the angry Missouri should have been sufficient to cause any alert driver to pause. But the trucker could only think about the number of miles he must still drive to finish a tough haul to Salina. At that moment, he didn’t care if another idiot might be threatening a suicide jump.

Focused on the river below, Dr. Crooks stood outside the guardrail at the apex of the bridge, the roiling river ten stories below — the distance to impact easily sufficient to break his back and end his life. Several nearby assistants grasped the situation, understanding that this eighteen-wheeler would throw off sufficient wind draft to push the fitness expert out of a carefully practiced vertical pose and force an awkward angle that could snap his back. The truck’s diesel engine issued a throaty rumble, but Mark could not hear anyone’s warnings not to jump.

Instead, he gazed into the choppy, brown water below, envisioning his carefully selected landing spot, a deep gulch running through the river bed where his scuba diving surveillance mission had discovered this place of optimum depth, free from impaling junk. At six-foot-four inches tall and 215 pounds of sculpted muscle, he stood on the bridge ledge above the river as if a Greek god surveying the Aegean Sea from mighty cliffs of weathered limestone. He wore a midnight-black diver’s suit, which might offer some insulation upon impact, perhaps binding his anatomy together as the force of water, hard as concrete, made contact with his feet.

Mark’s intractable goal was to leap from the bridge and will himself into a perfect vertical posture soon after reaching the apex of trajectory. Then he would press his arms to his side so that they would not be dislocated or broken at impact. If his calculations were correct, buttressed by six months of dogged preparation, he would slide into the water without damaging himself, being the first human not to die by a jump from this precarious location. His focus had become so intense to have rendered awareness of impending danger irrelevant.

With three full breaths to oxygenate his system and prepare for the plunge, he pulled his arms behind him as if an artistic highdiver and leapt. The errant trucker rumbled by Mark’s jump location at forty-five miles an hour — five-miles an hour above the speed limit. The draft off the truck flung small rocks and paper liter behind it, and gusts caught Mark’s back as he reached jump apogee, pushing him head first into an uncontrolled, awkward freefall. His assistants gasped as they watched Mark cascade downward, his legs and arms flailing to return his body to a vertical posture.

Will Tests Life.

At the beginning of my second year of graduate school at the University of Kansas, several students and I were visiting a professor at her home. Her boyfriend stopped by, a man of imposing stature. At six-foot-four-inches and with a chiseled jaw, Mark appeared to be a stereotypical jock, albeit one who could have also posed as a male fashion model. I learned that he was a PhD candidate seeking double degrees in sports psychology and exercise physiology.

Mark’s extraordinary fitness and friendly nature caused me to confess that I was then having concerns about my health. By the early 1970s, the connections between cigarette smoking and cancer were gaining wider acceptance in spite of persistent denials by tobacco companies. I knew my long-term health was on the line. Mark invited me to go jogging with him and though hesitant I accepted.

The next Saturday we ran in a city park in Lawrence, and at first I kept pace, being young and lean. But as the miles stretched out, Mark’s graceful stride left me in the background. He jogged effortlessly ahead in the distance. Because health was what I wanted more than anything after a childhood of illness, I quit smoking four days later, on September 14, 1973, an auspicious occasion more important to me than my birthday. Mark never scolded or lectured me about smoking but caused me to seek health because of his example.

As our friendship grew, I discovered that he also had confronted severe illnesses in childhood but to a degree far greater than my own tribulations. When he was an infant and living with his mother in Mexico City, relentless intestinal bleeding threatened his life; but his mother persevered until she found a physician with knowledge of nutrition who prescribed a life-saving diet of soy instead of cow’s milk.

When Mark was two, he suffered from severe sinus infections, and a then-experimental therapy involved X-ray radiation. By today’s standards, Mark received an unfiltered radiation overdose fifty times what's recommended for an adult, predisposing him to cancer.

When he was eight, a tumor appeared on the left side of his neck; the diagnosis: neurogenic sarcoma. Surgeons removed muscle, lymph and nerve tissue, including the sternoclydomastoid muscle, which is responsible for assisting with head and neck rotation. Instead of becoming handicapped relative to his peers, Mark tenaciously worked out, played football, and ran in track while in high school, earning letters in both sports.

Because he had lost muscle tissue on his left side, throwing his physical symmetry out of balance, Mark also became committed to resistance training until he built himself up to the physical stature I first witnessed at my professor’s house. He joined the marines after high school, surviving the mental and physical ordeals of three months of training at Parris Island, South Carolina: “the ultimate rite of passage into manhood.” He also wanted to dispatch a lingering threat of cancer’s metastasis.

Mark may be the only marine in history who was also a pre-induction cancer patient, enduring rigorous training at Parris Island while receiving an Honorable Discharge after three years of service. In the Marine Corps, he also learned to love running since new recruits ran everywhere as they fulfilled daily duties.

Mark worked tenaciously to get his PhD, and discoveries during his education, as well as life experiences, became the foundation of his book entitled Achieving Wellness through Risk Taking. This book preceded many of the health and fitness trends of the 1980s and articulated now-commonplace ideas about nutrition and fitness. His premise is set forth in the book title: human beings can achieve greater states of health by taking measured risks.

While working as a health consultant in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Mark performed a number of experiments to test his own physical and psychological endurance, as well as to demonstrate principles set forth in his book. The feat of greatest impact to me was his jump from ten stories off the Paseo Street Bridge in Kansas City, into the swirling Missouri River below.

Mark prepared for months, enlisting support from scientific and medical advisors. The physical challenge for him was to enter the water vertically. Since the upper half of the human body weighs more than the lower half, the body has a tendency to tumble forward when falling from great heights.

If he did not hit the water exactly upright, he risked breaking his back. Several tortured people had already committed suicide from the location of his jump. Mark spent many weekends jumping from successively higher cliffs in the Missouri Ozarks until he perfected ways to achieve vertical orientation in midair.

Practice did make perfect, and, after making mid-jump corrections due to draft from the passing eighteen-wheeler, he landed artistically, making a small splash and emerging from the depths of the muddy river unscathed.

On another harrowing adventure of five days duration, Mark swam and floated from Kansas City, Kansas, to St. Louis, Missouri, in the Missouri River. Not only did he encounter man-made dangers, such as fishing lines and barges threatening to pull him into their wake, he also struggled with severe hypothermia since the muddy river relentlessly sucked away body heat.

I understood these experiments as true testimonials to the power of mind over body. Their enactment stood as a metaphor for Eros, the life force.

Mark didn’t choose to live in a safe, predictable groove; his early encounters with mortality caused him to stare death in the face — by his accounting — thirty-nine times. To Mark and many people lucid about the exigencies of mortal existence, this aggressive, gentle man chose to challenge life on his terms.

In 1992, Mark called me to let me know that the area around his Adam’s apple had swollen twelve times normal size. The diagnosis of thyroid cancer, undoubtedly a residual of his overdose of X-ray radiation, did not bend his knees for more than two days. Surgeons removed the cancerous gland, and forty-eight hours later Mark ran 2 ½ miles through wooded trails around his home. Again, this aggressive activity wasn’t rash; Mark had prepared with weeks of conditioning for the surgery and rapid return to extreme activity.

Mark called me nine years later to tell me that while running his usual path he felt tightness in his chest. He finished the four-mile run but continued wheezing and coughing over the next few weeks. One day while running he coughed and tasted blood. After a carousel of medical tests, surgeons recommended evasive surgery to remove a cancerous egg-shaped tumor.

Mark spent six weeks getting into peak condition for one of the most difficult and painful surgeries imaginable. The week following his operation was excruciating; removal of his left lung also required breaking ribs.

As he told me, “Getting to the bathroom was like running a marathon (and I refused to use a bedpan). Tubes hung from everywhere: a venous line, an arterial line, a needle in my low back delivering titrated morphine, an oxygen tube in my nose, and drainage tubes under my left armpit.”

Mark reflected on the irony of his own medical history: “I have never smoked, and I avoid others who smoke. I was a running pioneer, doing it way before it became a social norm. I could not rationalize this happening to me. I had crafted my body into 215 lbs of toughness, and this was not part of the plan.”

Nevertheless, Mark struggled out of his bed, where it was so much easier to lay anesthetized by pain medications, and began to fight At first he walked hesitantly. Then he set physical goals. His one-year post-operative celebration included running three miles nonstop. His goal for the next year was to run four miles nonstop, which again he accomplished. Then he ran three miles in thirty minutes.

Mark believed his survival through so many adversities was due to a determined effort that never waned. “It comes from winning all those little confrontations with oneself. Once I’m standing on a treadmill, I know that I have won. This is how I survive.”

Getting old isn't part of the plan for many Baby Boomers, a generation noted for its youth-seeking character. But the human condition demands that we age, and we have two fundamental choices for how we do it: to surrender to aging, allowing the body to unravel with the mind and spirit; or to confront and fight aging, as was the path of Dr. Mark Crooks, who faced the diseases and accidents of aging long before his contemporaries.

In November 2009, Mark learned that lesions had appeared in his liver. Resolute as always, he began exploring how he might receive a liver transplant. Medical policies required that patients be declared cancer free for at least five years before a transplant could be scheduled.

When it became clear to Mark that this would be his final confrontation with Thanatos, he accepted his fate and continued exercising in whatever form he could manage, even pushing an IV cart in front of him as he circumnavigated a hospital floor. He never stopped challenging himself until one week before his death — a week spent in the Kansas City Hospice. He died on July 8, 2010.

What have I learned about aging from Mark? Any excuse not to stay in the best shape possible is insufficient. Any excuse not to keep setting and fighting for goals is inadequate.

Life is a test of will demanding that we make conscious daily choices to prevail and thrive. Mark’s approach to living is also an optimistic metaphor for a generation getting older and coming to represent societal conceptions of the aging process.

We can choose Thanatos and allow our bodies to perish due to sloth and gluttony, bad habits and dependencies, or we can choose Eros and get in shape physically and mentally, redefining the meaning of aging. We can confront media forces aimed at tearing apart aging spirits and demonstrate that this generation is not narcissistic, self-absorbed, fatuous, or any other condescending label.

To the media and to ourselves, we can resurrect an aphorism from our youth: “Hell no, we won’t go.” Against all odds, we won’t go passively to Thanatos. We will go on.

Enjoy an intense and uplifting story inspired by Mark's life through Brent Green's biographical novel, Warrior, which focuses on the protagonist's steadfast commitment to health and fitness while fighting cancer for 57 years. 

Click on this link to order your copy of Warrior on Amazon.

All photos and videos, Copyright 2020, Brent Green. All rights reserved.

Related articles

Two Major Boomer Wellness Goals: End of Sarcopenia, Compression of Morbidity

A Digital Art Form Redefines Generational Marketing through Nostalgia

For over seventeen years, I have argued in favor of Generational Marketing — an approach to brand development that connects products and services to generational nostalgia, merging past with present.

This approach to building brand identity and product awareness has critics. Some believe nostalgia borrows too much attention away from a product: consumers get caught up in an ad’s nostalgic moments and then ignore or forget the product being promoted. Some insist that nostalgia is focused on the past, and Boomers today are looking ahead: past experiences divert thinking to bygone life chapters that have been read, closed and preferentially forgotten.

My arguments about the efficacy of Generational Marketing throughout this blog and in my book, Generation Reinvention, are based on rigorous social science research and sociological theory. This line of reasoning appeals to critical thinking but possibly does not drive my points home with emotional clarity.

In this post I am sharing a few visceral experiences of the past. Consider a futuristic advertisement for Coca Cola:

 

For movie fans among you, does the setting appear vaguely familiar? The image became part of cultural history in 1982 through a Stanley Kubrick movie entitled Blade Runner. And in 2011 a striking manifestation of this memorable movie moment emerged through a powerful digital art form.

So, is this cinematic moment an image of the past, present or future? Could the power of generationally shared nostalgia give consumers another memorable brand impression, increasing awareness of and consideration for Coca Cola?

Artist Gustaf Mantel has created an extraordinary series of animated GIFs that bring new resonance and emotional endurance to cultural history. Called cinemagraphs, these subtle animations merge the powerful selectivity of still photography with video to portray “something more than a photo but less than a video.”

Now, let me ask you if this copy seems familiar: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” If this statement does not strike a responsive chord, perhaps Mantel's GIF will transport you back to an eerie moment 40 years ago:

 

What if a contemporary marketer for a brand of blue jeans integrated this memorable image of Jack Nicholson in The Shining with a product message aimed at Boomers — something about the iconic comfort of chic casual blue jeans? Or what might a tennis ball marketer do with such a moving and memorable vignette?

Generational nostalgia can be captured in many ways, especially when marketers merge the newest technologies with shared experiences and an art form that gives new meaning to hard-wired memories.

If a marketer wants to stir up anti-authoritarian feelings in a generation — the sense of being outcast for superficial reasons such as appearing older in a youth-oriented society — the marketer might resurrect dialogue from another classic movie: “Hey, man. All we represent to them, man, is somebody who needs a haircut.” 

And then the marketer can share a visual reminder of what it felt like to be dismissed during youth for arbitrary fashion reasons:

 

This anti-authoritarian declaration is taking on new meaning during the era of COVID-19, when many Boomer men are allowing their hair to grow for months because of virus infection risks associated with getting a haircut.

In a direct mail campaign my team created for Orange Glo International and its OxiClean brand, we transformed a photographic image with nostalgic appeal into a brochure cover — tapping a memory buried in the psyche of almost any Boomer who in childhood took a lingering bubble bath while playing with a favorite toy:

 

With cinemagraphic technology, we could have expressed our idea in another, perhaps more memorable way: 

 

“When you have to shoot, shoot, don’t talk.” The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)

Some viewers looking at these moving images will see merely photographs enhanced by motion-capture technology, perhaps experiencing some charming interpretations of bygone times. I see something more. I see potential for product marketers — particularly those employing online media channels — to reach the hearts and minds of a generation with nostalgic moments reinterpreted for contemporary times and products.

This may not have been the primary intention of artist Gustaf Mantel, but his captivating art form has thought-worthy implications for marketers trying to create brand impressions in a cluttered online world:

 

Related articles

In Memorium: John Darin, LA radio personality on the road again, going places he's never been

GE's healthymagination, Baby Boomers and the Future of Healthcare Marketing

Motivation for Boomers to Achieve Fitness and Health Resolutions in 2015

Historical Revisionism Vs. Truth ... Understanding How the Past Influences the Present

Two very different chapters of history have recently occupied my mind.

In an interesting TIME magazine article about The Civil War, 150 Years After Fort Sumter: Why We're Still Fighting the Civil War, author David Von Drehle develops cogent arguments for the idea that this horrific war began five years before Fort Sumter with a massacre of abolitionists in Lawrence, Kansas, in May 1856. People died because they preferred to live in a “free state.” I attended the University of Kansas and did not know this sobering fact about the home of my Alma mater.

It’s not entirely due to my ignorance.

After the war and until the beginning of the modern civil rights movement, historians and public intellectuals typically packaged the purpose of this war for reasons other than the divide over slavery. According to the opinion of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, for example, this war was a battle for “liberty, property, honor and life.” Slavery became but a footnote if mentioned at all in the years following the war. It is only just now, 159 years after the war officially began at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, that the rationale and true context for the war has become fully manifest.

During one of my Generation Reinvention podcasts, I interviewed Rob Kirkpatrick, author of 1969: The Year Everything Changed. Rob has undertaken a scrupulous initiative to document many facets of a year that did, indeed, shape the nation—history he does not personally recall since he was merely two-years-old then.

For example, we discussed the Vietnam War and a deadly battle for control of Ap Bia, a 3,000 foot mountain near the Laotian border. As Rob wrote, this battle would become “a microcosm of the strategic hardships experienced by American forces in Vietnam.”

This became the first significant battle in which American soldiers openly questioned with national news media the strategic wisdom of their commanders in a battle eventually called Hamburger Hill, a raw metaphor for the human carnage, a watershed turning point in popular support of the war. Although the battle was a victory for the US, with 84 fatalities compared to over 600 North Vietnamese deaths, American media and the nation’s antiwar majority started demanding, “What are we fighting for?” This is a question that has resurfaced with every subsequent war in which the US has engaged since Vietnam.

Two very different historical chapters and their contemporary implications emphasize how critical it is that we accurately understand bygone times to avoid repeating mistakes of the past or revising the record, rendering the past mythical rather than factual. The Civil War and 1969 are too often misunderstood or misrepresented today.

Rob Kirkpatrick also shares my observations about how marketers sometimes borrow emotionally charged symbols and slogans from popular culture as a way to brand and sell consumer products, a process called co-optation. I wrote about historical revisionism and marketing co-optation in Marketing to Leading-Edge Baby Boomers:

When some media today choose to report about “the sixties,” they often derive background coverage and image positioning from distorted archival reports, thus perpetuating simplistic stereotypes and generalizations as valid truths.

The media, sometimes sympathetic to students and their political demonstrations, chose then, and often still choose, to reflect inaccurately the true context of the era. Media bias has led to distorted reification of Baby Boomers as a construct through persistent presentation of outlandish personalities and the antics of notorious celebrities connected to student demonstrations. Some journalists and news accounts actually encouraged an escalation of militancy, theatrical expression, and a turn toward revolutionary behavior.

Thomas Frank, author of The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism, provides substantial evidence of mobilization of bias in his critique of business and the sixties. He observes that mentioning the sixties and associated images arouses in some “an astonishing amount of rage against what many still imagine to have been an era of cultural treason.”

Although the sixties’ era has been commonly positioned as a time of narcissism and social destructiveness (the popular movie character Austin Powers notwithstanding), on the contrary, most young people in my experience consciously embraced a philosophy of non-violence while opposing the horrific violence of racism, poverty, environmental assaults, and American bombardment of Vietnam.

I write from personal experience to this point: Most Boomers were going about the business of earning college degrees and/or starting careers—albeit sometimes in slow motion because of the social and cultural struggles—while playing active roles in grassroots mobilization, and they were motivated by a sense of obligation to others far more than self-gratification.

Another interesting but complex concept has played a role in manufacturing what society now thinks of as “the bad sixties.” This is the theory of co-optation or the tendency of the marketing industry to have quickly embraced the powerful iconographic images and metaphors of young Boomers, transforming them into commercial messages. Thus, the symbols of the social revolution became distilled into come-hither selling images in magazine ads and television commercials; the creative revolutionaries in the advertising industry chose to mimic and mass-produce counterculture so that their corporate clients could cash in on the youth psychographic. The more ardent proponents of this theory even claim that the co-optation process helped to nullify the revolutionary aspects of the counterculture, thereby mollifying its threat to mainstream value consensus.

I believe, at the very least, that co-optation by the marketing industry, my industry, helped to synthesize in society’s collective memory the most superficial, unsavory, cynical, pugnacious images of the antiwar and democratic mobilization movements of the sixties and seventies. Businesses also made money through co-optation, which, by itself, is not necessarily a bad thing. When this commercially manufactured history becomes history, however, many start having a problem with the prevailing official record, as do I.

The Civil War and 1969 have little in common, other than being periods of extreme internal strife within the borders of the nation. Contemporary beliefs about what happened during both historical chapters are amorphous. History has sometimes been revised. Products and brands have been sold following symbol and slogan homogenization.

Consumer marketing sometimes takes hold of the symbols and slogans, decontextualizes and simplifies them, rendering them meaningless beyond positioning goods and services in consumers’ minds. Responsible marketing begins with respect for the true historical record. Neither consumers nor society wins when we collectively forget or fail to heed the truths and lessons of history.

I believe an optimum intersection exists between historical accuracy and marketing, and, in fact, marketing can be conceived that helps clarify the historical record so more Americans better understand their legacies and moral responsibilities going forward.

When it comes to 1969, and the sixties more broadly, an education about what happened and insights about what these events mean today can commence with Rob Kirkpatrick’s thorough exploration, 1969: The Year Everything Changed. 

I would be remiss if I failed to mention my collaborative book on the same subject: 1969: Are You Still Listening? Written with seven co-authors, all of whom experienced 1969 first hand, our book shares deeper insights into what we experienced as a generation, how the events of that year became significant formative experiences impacting us today, and what we learned from our youth revolution. 

Two Major Wellness Goals for Your Aging Body: End of Sarcopenia, Compression of Morbidity

The aged man struggled to get out of his recliner. His leg muscles could not lift his weight into a vertical position, so he fell back into the chair, exhausted. He sat there for a few minutes, trying to command his weak muscles to help him stand. He barely had strength to push upwards with his hands against armrests.

Finally in a single determined push with arms and forward momentum from rocking, he stood, though unsteadily. It took a few seconds for him to find his balance so he could then shuffle from his recliner to reach the bathroom. There he would need to sit again, and he knew that leaving the stool would be equally arduous — maybe impossible. How he dreaded the idea of becoming immobilized and unable to escape the prison of sitting.

One morbid challenge confronting Boomers as they age many not ring familiar to you. But when you think about it, you might consider aging from a different perspective.  Called sarcopenia, this challenge involves muscle wasting due to aging.

Sarcopenia derives from the Latin roots, "sarco" for muscle, and "penia" for wasting, making it a “muscle wasting disease.” Sarcopenia is a byproduct of the aging process, the progressive loss of muscle fiber that begins in middle age. The process starts in our 30s but, unchecked, leads to rapid deterioration in strength and endurance in the mid-60s. Without intervention, adults can lose as much as 8% of muscle mass every ten years.

Sarcopenia propels a cascade of other medical problems. Less muscle mass and strength leads to faster fatigue. Chronic fatigue leads to less physical activity and a more sedentary lifestyle. Less activity results in fat gain and obesity. Excess weight contributes to glucose intolerance, type II diabetes and a condition called metabolic syndrome. This syndrome can then cause hypertension and increasing risk for cardiovascular disease. The end-state of sarcopenia is death.

Muscle wasting contributes dramatically to eldercare costs. Once older patients become incapable of the activities of daily living, such as rising unassisted from a recliner, they are usually institutionalized in nursing homes and assisted living facilities where most remain until death.

I participated in an Innovators Summit: “a unique forum where leaders representing a variety of sectors join together to design new business models, network about possibilities, and spawn new insights around the aging marketplace of the future.” Staged at The Broadmoor in Colorado Springs, where I was formerly advertising and public relations director, the Summit brought together professionals involved in aging services, home healthcare, architecture, homebuilding, academics, medicine, technology, wellness, retailing, and of course, marketing. Participating organizations included Ecumen, Eskaton, IDEO, GE, Pfizer, Intel and AARP.

A significant part of this exercise in “deep conversation” involved forming interdisciplinary innovation groups addressing seven topical areas, including “home based care,” “new financial models,” “dementia and cognitive health,” and “livable communities.” I joined a group discussing the future of “prevention and wellness,” an area that his interested me for decades and has involved clients of Brent Green & Associates, such as Experimental and Applied Sciences, Men’s Fitness magazine, the Institute for Health Realities, Men’s Health magazine, and Nestle.

Although wellness encompasses a vast array of subspecialties, from nutrition to socialization, I suggested we focus our discussion on sarcopenia. Knowing that this clinical-sounding word needed a more innovative title, a preventative medicine physician on our team suggested “Strong Muscle, Strong Living” as a friendlier, more benefit-oriented statement of purpose.

From this starting point, the innovation team began envisioning business possibilities. We summarized our innovation as follows:  “An integrated package of products and services with substantial media messaging dedicated to empowering the 50+ market to maintain muscle strength and mobility across the life span. This package includes assessment, nutrition science, exercise technology, positive messaging, mobility health and education.”

Imagine a public service media campaign developed to help adults 50+ become more aware of the hazards and risks associated with unchecked muscle wasting. What if the alien word “sarcopenia” or a friendlier euphemism became as familiar to the public as ED — erectile dysfunction? Could this campaign reduce healthcare costs by focusing 50+ adults on muscle maintenance long before the pernicious downward spiral toward frailty begins?

Our innovation team then imagined some business implications of sarcopenia mitigation as a public health priority. The first obvious area of opportunity lies in nutrition science.

Abbott, for example, introduced a brand extension of Ensure, its nutritional beverage supplement often associated with eldercare institutions. The company has named its new product Ensure High Protein. Flavored shakes include 16 grams of protein, 24 vitamins and minerals, and a quixotic new ingredient Abbott calls “Revigor,” an amino acid metabolite.

Beta-hydroxy beta-methylbutyrate, popularly referred to as HMB, is a supplement that may act as a “protein breakdown suppressor” and thus can serve as a performance facilitator for resistance training such as weight lifting. According to some proponents, HMB boosts strength levels, enhances gains in muscle size and strength, and prevents post-workout muscle tissue breakdown. Clearly, nutrition science can become the wellspring of future supplemental food products that lessen sarcopenia progression while improving strength and endurance in older adults.

Proponents of HMB and other supplements insist that nutrition by itself will not prevent muscle wasting. Thus, opportunities abound for fitness equipment designers to develop machines and training regimens that can help Boomers work out more effectively and frequently. A fitness machine has yet to be invented that takes a lot of the work out of working out, thus helping users push through psychological resistance to resistance training.

The next successful video workout program may be waiting for a superstar proponent. For example, Jane Fonda’s Workout has been credited for launching the fitness craze among Boomers who in the 1980s were arriving in middle age.

The Oscar-winning actress introduced in 2010 a DVD set targeting older adults called Jane Fonda Prime Time. Two videos are entitled “Walk Out” and “Fit and Strong,” with the first focused on aerobics and the second on strength training. This regimen is heading in the right direction, but the exercise level required to participate is more suited to those already experiencing handicapping physical limitations. The most on-target innovation may be a hybrid series of workouts: less aggressive than youth-oriented P90X and more challenging than Fonda’s tamed-down workout for folks already significantly limited by disabilities.

Sarcopenia, a mystical word not to be confused with a Greek isle in the Aegean Sea, stimulates grand possibilities for innovation… in nutrition science, fitness equipment, video training programs, retirement community social engineering, public education, consumer products, and marketing budgets to sell all the aforementioned opportunities. Our innovation team agreed that not only can a national focus on sarcopenia potentially mitigate premature aging and death, but this agenda could further reduce spurious healthcare financial burdens confronting the nation.

Strong muscles mean stronger, sometimes longer lives. Through sarcopenia mitigation, Boomers can compress their morbidity — thereby lessening the burdens of old age illnesses by compressing an unwanted time of life into the shortest period possible before the final exit.

To visualize this cultural and business revolution personified, think of Jack LaLanne, a pioneer in fitness and strength training, who had a robust and productive life until age 96, dying from pneumonia after just a few weeks of illness. Strong muscles, strong life, quick death from natural causes. The circle of life doesn’t come full circle any better. 

Social Networking to Change the World for Good in 2020: An Online Revolution

Before How Comes Why

The Internet provides single individuals with the most potent medium in history to effect change, nearby and far away. Social networks are no longer merely local and temporal but rather global and eternal. We have daily opportunities to influence hundreds, thousands or even millions with a single Tweet, Facebook post, or Linked-In update. One brilliant blog article can transform nations.

The power of these 21st century technologies became clearer to me when watching an extraordinary YouTube video entitled “Where the hell is Matt?” Matt Harding’s contemporary story reminds me of a younger version of me — full of adventure and idealism during college. Like many of us back then, he is a young iconoclast stubbornly intent on making the world better while having a blast doing it. 

Matt traveled to 42 countries in 14 months to create a 4-minute, 30-second video showcasing his silly dance. Through the YouTube social network he enlisted thousands of strangers to silly-dance with him. His video has attracted over 52 million views. That’s over 52 million impressions of an uplifting metaphor: a message underscoring we’re fundamentally all the same regardless of nation, race or culture. That’s an idealistic coming-of-age theme, flung into hyperspace with a social networking tool that didn’t exist before February 2005. His viral success led to a follow-up video four years later -- delivering 19.7 million views:

My contemporaries are no longer swarming college campuses where many staked their idealistic claims on the future. We’ve grown up and apart, geographically and mentally. Author David B. Wolfe wrote about the inexorable influence of aging on adult psychological development. As we age we become more “individuated, introspective and autonomous.” Intrinsic connections to generational peers become misty and diffuse.

This has all transformed since Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 while working for the European Particle Physics Laboratory. (Tim is a Boomer born on June 8, 1955 in London, England.) Burgeoning online social networks that have since emerged create new pathways into generational consciousness. The Internet allows legions to reach across geographic boundaries, to find like-minded contemporaries, and to discover universal life themes and passions.

Online social networks offer rich potential for connecting, learning, engaging, and changing the status quo, much as our colleges offered us in youth. The Internet creates the campus experience for us today, a melange teaming with ideas, insights and camaraderie.

I submit that one critical “why” of building worldwide social networks is to come together, right now. Online and interconnected we can tackle challenges of shared concern: climate change; ageism; age discrimination in the workplace; third-age careers; availability of affordable healthcare; viability of social insurance programs such as Social Security and Medicare; and, ultimately, legacies of generations, whether environmental, technological, or social. We can focus attention on public education for grandchildren, or saner immigration policies, or more funding for research into “orphan diseases.” We can nurture vanishing art forms such as quilt making or angler’s fly tying. We can raise money to do all this.

It’s through our expanding online networks that we can debate the issues we once deliberated late-at-night in dorm rooms throughout the nation’s college campuses. We can find closeness with contemporaries we’ll never meet face-to-face. We can remain intimate and current with far-flung children and grandchildren and use the network to assure intergenerational transfer of values. We can organize our thoughts and plan actions through distributed teams. We can link, tweet, and write articulate blog arguments to improve “collective mentalities” around the worth of people at every age.

We can even bring fame to new artists and thought revolutionaries who often herald possibilities before change takes hold in mainstream beliefs and values. Susan Boyle showed us one way in 2009.

Susan, age 48 at the time, a church volunteer from lackluster Blackburn, Scotland, became an instant celebrity. The YouTube video of her shocking performance on “Britain’s Got Talent,” the UK version of “American Idol,” has received over 241 million views. 

But trouncing Simon Cowell, the cynical talent judge, is not the end of this woman’s remarkable accomplishments. Her debut CD, “I Dreamed a Dream,” sold over 700,000 copies in the United States in one week, becoming the fastest-selling album in British history, soaring to the number one sales position in Canada, New Zealand, Ireland, and Australia. Susan shattered any arguments that emerging musical talent belongs only to youth. In terms of sales, she smashed the best debut album of The Beatles.

Those of us nearing or in retirement can still change the world with our creative gifts, making it better, fairer, more inclusive. We can use these networks to connect with many more peers than possible during our college years. We can live beyond our time, influencing social and political evolution long into the future. We can ensure that our forebears move closer to realizing our ideals of peaceful coexistence, a healthy planet … a world less downtrodden by human suffering.

Graham Nash, the British member of classic rock super-group, Crosby, Stills & Nash, wrote a politically charged song about the chaotic 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Regardless of the song’s original context, his lyrics ring true through decades:

Though your brother's bound and gagged
And they’ve chained him to a chair
Won’t you please come to Chicago
Just to sing
In a land that’s known as freedom
How can such a thing be fair
Won't you please come to Chicago
For the help we can bring
We can change the world –
Re-arrange the world…

Today we share a world less dominated by traditional media, a world connected through fiber-optics and satellites, a world shrinking into desktop computer monitors and handheld smart phones displaying media channels born of this century: Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Typepad, YouTube, Blogger — websites and apps conceived to draw us together, to engage our passions, to affect how we see ourselves and believe in our possibilities.

And now, more than ever, we have a unique generational challenge to be the change, to re-engage with more mature purpose, to rearrange the world. We have the tools and freedom like we’ve never had them before.

The rest is up to us.