Baby Boomers - a Market Mark

We baby boomers have targets on our backs. Particularly if our wallets are in our back pockets. It’s our wallets being targeted, wherever we may keep them. Our parents were “the greatest generation.” We’re the greatest demographic. We are marked as a market, a moving target, true, but a large one and, apparently, predictable. Or at least persuasible – so the marketers think. Believe. Hope. Bank on.

Gang, listen up. We learned critical thinking in the 1960’s, when “question authority” was our categorical imperative. Our groupthink mantra was individuality. We are arguably the last generation largely educated (that is to say, in public schools) in the fine art of critical thinking. It’s too bad public schools have failed so resoundingly to create a skeptical and questioning citizenry since then, creating instead generation after generation of gullible consumers. But that’s a topic for another time.

Today, we’re being reminded of the fine point to which our minds were honed in youth, so we can retain that edge. Then, our parents couldn’t predict what authority we would question next. Why now don’t we question “everyman” actors touting miracle cures or get-rich-quick schemes on infomercials? Then, we ourselves couldn’t predict what we would do next. Why now can the marketers predict us so accurately?

What have we become?

We have not become our parents. Those of them still alive are nicely retired on all those years of Social Security that we paid into while we were working, and those nice investments in companies whose executives took real risks, cooked no books, and performed no perp walks. No, we’re not our parents – we’re worse off in some material ways. The other thing we’re not is who we started out to be – those inventive creators of a better society.