Adapted from Franklin Street’s Healthcare Marketing Trends Report

According to Ford’s Trends report, 60 is the new 50 is the new 40.

Thanks to medical innovations and prolonged life expectancy, consumers are staying young mentally as well as physically. In other words, we’re living longer, and we’re feeling younger.

Consider:

• Many Baby Boomers with good health habits and good genes can expect to live past 90 years.
• 70% of boomers say they plan to work past the traditional retirement age of 65.
• 64% of adults describe themselves as “youthful.”
• Female gamers over 55 spend more time online gaming than males ages 15 to 40.

Cultural anthropologists call this shift of age perspective “down-aging” – older adults are viewing themselves as younger and younger. This clashes with healthcare’s well-worn imagery library. (How many times have we seen photos of “granny” planting flowers to sell hip replacements?)

Now that The Rolling Stones have kicked off their 50th Anniversary tour, it’s time for us to re-evaluate how we talk to our “older” audiences. They don’t want to slow down; in fact, they’re just getting started. (Take my 60+ year old step-mother who goes to Zumba class three times a week and knows more about pop culture music than her 30-something stepson.)

The down-aging cultural shift makes for a new way of thinking about your healthcare audience. But first, do you know who they are? Quantitative brand studies may provide you feedback regarding your brand, but what about your audience? How much do you know about how she uses her smartphone to send and receive text messages from her grandchildren? How many hours a day does she read from her Kindle Fire? Is she (gasp) using Twitter to chat with friends while watching The Bachelor?

Focus groups and one-on-one interviews are invaluable tools for learning more about your “down-aging” audience. We’re finding as much value in asking our clients’ prospective patients about their use of technology and what they do for fun as we do relying on the standard discussion guide about healthcare brands and hospital decision-making. The results we are getting are shaping new ways for us to engage our audiences: from image selection for ads to leveraging digital channels to reach the audience. (She still reads the newspaper, by the way – but increasingly from her iPad.)

Here’s a recent television commercial we created for St. Mary’s Hospital in Huntington, West Virginia for their cardiac services program, which illustrates the concept of “down-aging” and appealing to today’s older audiences’ more youthful spirit.

If you’re in the healthcare marketing and branding community, you know that internal stakeholders are typically conservative in what they allow you to say and show in your advertising. (This often translates into advertising that is easy to ignore, and often is. But that’s the stuff of another blog entry.) Our suggestion is to leverage this trend of  ”down-aging” by hosting a trends presentation with stakeholders on the topic. Use secondary research like this blog along with primary research you conduct (like the focus groups idea mentioned above) to engage your internal audiences. Because you’re dealing with healthcare practitioners and professionals, they’re likely to respond evidenced-based recommendations. In other words, it’s not just you touting the next trend in healthcare marketing. (Nobody is ever a prophet in their own land.)

Who knows? You just might get approval to start a seniors Zumba class at your hospital.

Adapted from Franklin Street’s Healthcare Marketing Trends Report

Tweet