Award-winning advertising copywriter Chuck Nyren knows a
thing or two about baby boomers. To start with, he is one, but beyond that he
helps companies create advertising that speaks to this age group.
Nyren believes that many companies are losing baby boom customers
because their advertising fails to speak to boomers. To remedy this, he advises,
in part, that firms should demand that their advertising agencies put baby
boomers in charge of creating campaigns for their peer group. Just as he would
not feel comfortable creating advertising for twenty-somethings, he thinks it is
a big mistake to expect twenty-somethings to create advertising campaigns that
speak to boomers.
His book is filled with examples and suggestions for
industries such as housing, pharmaceuticals, automotive, travel, and financial
planning, all industries that try to attract customers from the baby boom
generation.
In this updated and revised edition, Nyren continues his
crusade to get ad agencies to recognize the importance of using baby boomers to
create advertising targeted to baby boomers. He notes that since his first book
came out in 2005, baby boomers have begun to receive much more press, but
advertisers continue to overlook them as an important and influential
market.
Filled with timely
examples of both press and advertising campaigns, the book also explores
resources. A new interview with a British firm that is leading the way in
advertising and using direct mail with baby boomers is included.
ADVERTISING TO BABY BOOMERS
Targets Clients and
Entrepreneurs
Paramount Market Publishing, Ithaca, N.Y., June
30, 2005
Baby Boomers are sophisticated consumers of advertising,
having grown up in the heyday of mass marketing. Companies that don't understand
this sophistication are doomed.
Yet many rely on advertising
agencies that believe the baby boom market is passé and not worth pursuing. The
real story may be that most agencies are ill-prepared for tackling the 50+
consumer, but don't want you to know it.
In his book Advertising to
Baby Boomers, Chuck Nyren takes on the excuses that large advertising agencies
give for not targeting the baby boom audience, and urges companies wanting to
attract this formidable market of 76 million people to rethink their approaches.
"Companies need to put pressure on their agencies," argues Nyren in his
groundbreaking book. "Some simple demands, a bit of vigilance, and you and your
agency can effectively reach this unwieldy demographic. If you're a
businessperson, you know that creative thinking doesn't begin and end inside an
advertising agency."
Using familiar examples, Nyren
advises how to change prescription drug advertising, discusses planned
retirement communities and the ways that they can be made more appealing to
maturing consumers, and more importantly, offers valuable advice on the
advertising of general consumer goods and services.
Exploding the myth that Baby
Boomers just want to retreat to their younger years, Nyren explains that Boomers
are not hung up on age. "Who actually thinks about his or her age all the time,
or even very often?" he asks. "Contrary to social commentators, the media, and
certainly advertising agencies, most of the time we are who we are: people in
our middle age, and not much different but a little different than other
generations were in their middle ages. We're not jumping in mosh pits while
juggling cans of soda, trying to be eighteen again. We are slyly redefining what
it means to be in our forties, fifties and sixties."
Chuck Nyren's egalitarian approach
to advertising and the creation of campaigns is all-inclusive. A large section
of the book is dedicated to helping Baby Boomer entrepreneurs get their
marketing and advertising up and running. The author as well gives advice and
guidance to the small businessperson on how to fashion a handmade
campaign.
Written to kick
start your creative thinking, Advertising to Baby Boomers will entertain you,
enlighten you, and make you a critic of every advertisement you see that should
appeal to Baby Boomers but doesn't.
"Do you want to have fun reading a business book and still
learn what it takes to cash in? Advertising to Baby Boomers exposes the habits
and hang-ups that are preventing companies from making fortunes from this
wealthy demographic. Written by a third-generation seasoned copywriter and
creative strategist, wise and welcome advice pokes up from every page, packaged
with occasional satire and silliness. Chuck Nyren is the Baby Boom generation's
advertising debunker." - Brent Green, author of Marketing to Leading-Edge Baby
Boomers
