Lifestage — Different Ages, Different Stages

Lifestyles are becoming streamlined, customized, and individual. Lifestyle marketing becomes a fine-hued set of skills where you take a somewhat common product or service and redesign it for a niche segment.

You learn to discover original and innovative pathways to your target audience. Every age group brings on the possibilities for capturing an entire segment of the population, for marketers who study and recognize the elements of change, and how it affects products.

Lifestyle marketing models are developed to corroborate the beliefs and core values of potential clients. Consumers are time and again changing their observations, outlooks, and spending patterns.

This creates a need for considerable effort and research to keep track of these changes.

As an example, let’s take the overall group of consumers who are either retired, or approaching retirement, and consider their needs, as viewed by a marketer intent on catering to the spending abilities of the so-called Baby-Boomer age group.

More and more each day, many of the Boomers begin to think in terms of “refocusing” rather than “retiring.”

Refocusing would allow this person to give his or her employer the mental and actual “boot out the door,” leaving them free to do something they enjoy that would keep them active and alert.

This new fork in the road might even bring in some supplementary income. Rather than refocusing on just one activity (somewhat like leaving one job for another), this individual is wanting to diversify their activities.

Perhaps some charity work, perhaps running a small Internet business, or perhaps some short-term, part-time work will fit them best.

These people want to choose how much time they devote to any of their medley of choices. In this short scenario, keep a vision of the products and services that accompany the self-employed, older person.

Products might range from software tools to automobiles! And this particular group, historically, is in a financial position to make major purchases.

The savvy marketer will not actually have to engineer new products, but instead, will “innovate” around the lifestyle, and repackage or tweak existing offerings to fit the need of the Boomer.

Or, this could be applied to any targeted group.

Another factor that is setting hurdles in the lifestyle marketing equation is the inroad the Internet has created in buying patterns.

Businesses must now take into consideration the online consumer, and base their product or service on the New Age consumer’s activity and shopping habits — which can also change in a hurry!

No matter your targeted lifestyle group, one of your primary challenges will be constant research and investigation.

These are the keys to tapping into any group of consumers’ needs and wants, no matter the differing stages in life.

Gilles Rais

Categories: Articles