A recent national study that is monitoring Baby Boomers’ attitudes say that marketers may have gotten it all wrong with regard to their assumptions about this large and important market segment, according to a market study conducted by Applied Research & Consulting (ARC), a public opinion polling and market research firm.
The market study, conducted by ARC in conjunction with Under The Radar, an advertising agency, sheds new light on Baby Boomers’ current beliefs, expectations, priorities and spending habits.
“There is a lot of conventional wisdom about Baby Boomers that doesn’t hold up under close scrutiny,” says Andy Tuck, a principal at ARC. “If there is anything we found that makes them distinct from other younger generations, it is in the nature of their expectations.”
Tuck points out that the Baby Boomer generation is a very diverse demographic group that resists stereotyping.
“Given the recent socio-economic turmoil, it is naive to still think of the baby boomer segment as a holdover from the 1960s,” says Denis Glennon, a partner at Under The Radar. “Nothing could be further from the truth as this generation, characterized by its sense of self-determination, has once again learned to adapt, improvise, and thrive during these challenging times.”
The market study was comprised of two components to ensure depth of response and its broad projectibility, namely, ethnographic interviews with Baby Boomers and a general population survey. In the first component, 45 ethnographic interviews, together with 26 shorter “screening interviews” were conducted. It has a range of Boomer markets in several U.S. Markets which include the New York Metro area, Washington D.C. and suburban Maryland, Boston, Denver, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago.
The second component, the online survey, was a nationally representative sample of 1,200 American adults ages 18-64. Multiple age segments were included in order to establish comparative norms among Baby Boomers (age 45-64), Generation X, Generation Y (25-44) and Millenials.
Applied Research & Consulting’s research is designed to enable its clients understand their relationships with key public constituencies in order to rethink problems and find innovative solutions.
Under The Radar is a full-service advertising agency that counts among its client categories consumer package goods, consumer electronics, household goods, corporate image, healthcare, life/disability insurance, OTC/DTC pharmaceuticals, all of which have contributed to a deep understanding of the sensibilities of the baby boomer segment.
