Baby Boomers – not all peas in a pod
Howard Lake | 15 December 2008 | Blogs
I’ve been poorly this week and missed out on lunch with one of my best business friends, a Baby Boomer like me.
Or maybe not like me at all?
Because, like Dorothy Donor, Baby Boomer doesn’t exist, except in the minds of marketers like ourselves.
Yes, we were all born between 1946 and 1964. But that’s 18 years – long enough for one Baby Boomer to father another.
Messages addressed to my colleague, on the brink of retirement, would be completely inappropriate to me – struggling to believe I’ll be 50 (fifty!) in January.
I’m inundated with demands from my various pension providers to make critical decisions about investments whose value is seemingly decreasing with each day’s delay, and I can’t do it.
He’s already made that commitment. He’s written himself a Job Description for retirement (terrific idea by the way) and is planning his spending accordingly.
I grew up listening to my father’s jazz and Punk Rock was the most influential music during my formative years. My would-be lunch colleague loves classical, especially opera.
However, my business friend and I share a love of good writing and a commitment to the charity sector. You might reach us both through the TLS, the Literary Review or Amazon.
It’s such shared characteristics that marketers need to uncover to make the most of the opportunities presented by Baby Boomers.
Because if you don’t, you might make the same mistakes some fundraisers made in thinking Dorothy Donor was their perfect supporter – and assuming she was a one-size-fits-all kinda girl when she turned out to prefer a tailored look, and she was just as likely to be a he.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.