hen 80-year-old Martha Smith wants to boil a cup of water in her microwave, she
turns the dial to the popcorn setting and hits ‘‘start’’. Unable to easily adjust the
digital timer on the device, she repeats this three times before it is warm enough for
a cup of tea. In a similar fashion, Martha has become a master of various microwave recipes,
all measured in terms of how many ‘‘popcorns’’ it takes to cook the food[1]. At 80 years of
age, Martha is part of the fastest growing sub-segment of the age 50þ population and
illustrative of how some aging consumers adapt to new products that have not been
designed with their needs or preferences in mind.
The global population is both aging and living longer due to improvements in health care and
nutrition. Age 50þ consumers are a growing economic force that will transform multiple
industries unlike any prior demographic shift in recent history. Yet most companies continue
to design for and advertise to the young. To capture value from the age 50þ market,
managers will have to master new skills and lead the transformation of products and strategy
to adapt to a changing marketplace.
With increasing longevity, there are already over half a billion age 50þ people in the world,
and the USA has more than 9.2 million age 80þ citizens. In Japan and Sweden, the odds for
women to live one hundred years were 1 in 50 at the end of the twentieth century compared
with 1 in 20 million at the end of the nineteenth[2, 3]. The Centre for Aging, in London,
estimates that by 2020 there will be nearly 700 million elderly (age 65þ) individuals in the
world. As Figure 1 illustrates, there is a dramatic global demographic shift underway.
Increased longevity will also see significant growth in the number of centenarians.