Empty nesters can put a lot of pressure on the holiday season. As former “helicopter parents,” we no longer have day-to-day involvement with (or control over) our adult children and many of us are joining the ranks of grandparents. Short of cutting out our tongues, there are many things we can do to ensure a fun, peaceful holiday visit to create memories for the entire family.

Here are some of my tips from current Allstate blog post. How do you keep the lines of communication open?

On stands now is the print edition of Forbes magazine (December 2011, Investment Guide). It features the story Boomers: Reinventing the Next Chapter, by Deborah L. Jacobs. Lori was interviewed for this article about her success in building a business that helps others to understand the needs and wants of the Baby Boomer and Senior consumers, and effectively reach them.

Lori’s latest blog post for MediaPost Communications Engage Boomer blog, discusses the drumbeat of the ‘Move Beyond Age’ movement has grown louder throughout this year, with conversations ranging from how to “re-tool” senior products for Boomers, to how to appeal to the largest demographic in today’s marketplace. Friends and partners are shining a light on human-centered design and the aging population.

Read Lori’s MediaPost Communications Engage Boomer blog post Move Beyond Age – Let’s Talk Better Design here.

In A Brutal Economy, Boomers Rewrite The Next Chapter

11/16/2011
(This story appears in the Dec. 5, 2011 issue of Forbes.)

So much has changed since our last issue of C2! The one constant is that the economic outlook continues to provoke anxiety. Older adults appear to be faring better in some respects than younger generations, though our studies show they continue to live under a cloud of worry. Many are expressing this as the loss of the American dream for younger generations, particularly their children and grandchildren.

Continuum Crew has experienced positive growth as the mature consumer market continues to be able to spend on a number of products and services for themselves and their extended families. In fact, a new MetLife Report on American Grandparents (July 2011) notes that households led by those aged 55 to 64 increased their non-health related spending by an average of $11,700 over the past ten years, when their household income rose just $1,200. Further, in the same ten-year period 55- to 64-year-olds spent $7.6 billion on baby food, infant equipment and clothing, toys, games, and tricycles – a 71% increase. Household spending for the 25- to 44-year-old households with children present saw a far smaller rate of increase indicating that baby boomer grandparents are helping in all new ways. (Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Surveys).

It has never been more important to listen carefully to consumers to understand what they want from products and services, and how they want to be engaged. Continuum Crew launched Crew Media earlier this year to purchase Eons.com – the only baby boomer social network. Founded in 2006 by Jeff Taylor, also founder of Monster.com, Eons has more than 800,000 members who have started more than 1,700 groups focused on their passions and interests. Learn more about it from community manager Ri Regina on page 13.

Also under the Crew Media banner is our partnership with GRAND – the digital magazine for the grandparenting lifestage. As a first-time grandmother to baby Gabriel McClain, I am proud to be GRAND’s new publisher.

Another initiative we launched this past spring is Move Beyond Age, a coalition of individuals and companies who are committed to making smart design a quality of life issue. We are encouraging companies to design better products and services for older consumers, which in turn create better experiences for every generation. Take a look at Jeffrey DeMure’s article on the Bookend Markets, Bill Yates on GreatCall, and Stephen Winner on the Silverado Story, for examples of companies and thought leaders who understand the importance of designing smart products and services.

Also new to Continuum Crew is The Business of Aging radio show on WeEarth Global Radio Network – WGRN. The show is also available here on our blog and on iTunes. In this issue we share our first show of the season, an interview with Patricia Lippe Davis from AARP Media Sales on her view of the mature consumer marketplace. We are currently in our second season and hope you will join our listenership as we talk about successful strategies for engaging consumers over 40.

With that, I am pleased to present to you our latest issue of 
C2 magazine, Issue 27, Autumn 2011

Available for download here.

Thank you for your continued enthusiasm for our market and our work here at Continuum Crew!

Lori Bitter,
Editor-in-Chief, C2 magazine

From the latest issue of the Journal on Active Aging, is the article Tackling Graywashing: What Drives It, How to  Recognize and Avoid It

The recent release of “The MetLife Report on American Grandparents,” by Peter Francese with MetLife Mature Market Institute, reveals the changing face of grandparents in the United States. It also provides a roadmap for companies with products and services for children. Increasingly, grandparents are helping young families financially navigate in this tough economic climate, paying for items essential to day-to-day life, and also looking forward to big-ticket items like tuition, cars, and college.

In 2010, there were an estimated 65 million grandparents in the United States alone; households headed by someone over the age of 45 accounts for 60% of the nation’s income. One in four adults in this country is a grandparent.

Today, a grandparent is the head of almost one in ten households and has a grandchild in residence. In spite of recent economic events, consumer spending in households 55+ has risen faster than any other age category, outpacing inflation. By 2020, projections reveal an increase to 80 million grandparents, one in three adults in the U.S.

Booming Grands: Younger, hipper more diverse grandparents

The majority of today’s grandparents are from the Baby Boomer generation; they appear more youthful, vital and active than grandparents of previous generations. In reality…

[Read more →]

For this article Can Empty Nesters Still Afford to Splurge? in the current issue of SmartMoney, I spoke with writer Missy Sullivan about the empty nesters’ mentality.

I’m pleased to have been asked by Allstate, one of the nation’s largest auto, home and life insurers also known for their “You’re in good hands” slogan, to be a guest blogger on their Allstate Blog.

In my first post, It’s Not Our Parent’s Middle Age, I’ve written about a trend that we have been tracking for the last two years, patterns of independent behavior among boomer couples (that is different from our parents’ generation) and the actions they are taking – some of these may surprise you!

In 2008, I read a paper titled “The Connected Agency” by Mary Beth Kemp and Peter Kim, for Forrester. The sub-head is “Marketers: Partner with an agency that listens instead of shouts.” It is a smart, insightful and important paper. It changed the way I think about what I do as an ad agency leader and the direction that the agency world needed to take. I believed then, as I do now, that the idea of “listening” is even more important if your goal is to engage consumers over the age of 40.

Make a better “agency”
Simply put, as agency leaders we must create better agencies. The idea that we can still shout at consumers with a :30 television spot — especially older consumers — is absurd. Yet we still have creative and new business teams that believe this is the central tactic in a campaign strategy.

In the mature consumer space, we are both agency and strategic advisor because many companies are unsure about how to navigate the demo. That requires the infrastructure and expertise to do both, and the investment in the right people to deliver on consulting projects — like defining the needs of an aging population and designing product strategies that align with a company’s goals. At Continuum Crew, we have broadened the idea of engagement from only communication to a true marketing approach.

Learn to nurture consumer connections
It isn’t enough to simply listen in on conversations about products, categories and brands. This new breed of agency knows how to nurture connections with consumers and is central to facilitating conversations. Traditional research and ethnographic studies are cost of entry. To be a true connected agency you must be completely integrated into a community. Johnson & Johnson has done this on the brand side with www.babycenter.com; it owns the motherhood life stage because it has conversations with moms, it listens to moms and it aligns product and communication strategy accordingly.

We are doing this with our recent launch of Crew Media and the acquisition of www.eons.com and the Eons Boom Media Ad Network. In just a short month of owning the site, we have a clear idea of what people over 40 care about, where their passions and interests lie, and what they do and don’t want in a community.

In the Eons community, consumers are the publishers. They are setting group protocol and behavior and, most importantly, filtering out brands that don’t share the groups’ values. We have always advised clients that peer endorsement in mature consumer demos is far more important than pushed out messaging. Until Eons, we haven’t seen the social proof so clearly and profoundly.

Insights, Networks and Incubation
Consumer listening isn’t very meaningful without the knowledge to turn it into an insight that creates a consumer moment. We encounter brands every day that have spent mega-dollars on studies with no actionable outcome. And there is the corollary — companies with great insights and no idea what to do with them, or no innovation infrastructure to support moving the insights forward.

Whether this is a problem of silos, funding or lack of leadership, it is becoming harder to move insight-driven ideas through large companies. Connected agencies can and should act as both a catalyst and a shepherd. The catalyst will create strategic partnerships for client companies that result in networks of organizations engaged in their success and who have consumer data to share. The shepherd will drive the work through the process of integrating consumer-driven data early in the product/service design and development process.

We believe that this model should result in virtual incubators inside of connected agencies, supported by the network. Now that our online community exists, this is our next adventure. There are pilots in market now!

This post originally appeared as a guest blog post on MediaPost’s Engage:Boomers, May 23, 2011