USING DEVELOPMENTAL RELATIONSHIP MARKETING (DRM), THE KEY TO TUNING YOUR MARKETING MESSAGE TO CONNECT WITH THE BABY BOOMERS

 

My friend and mentor, David B. Wolfe, passed away Dec. 3, 2011, after a long illness. David’s special interest was mature markets. He wrote Serving the Ageless Market and (co-authored) Ageless Marketing, Firms of Endearment, and his last book, Brave New Worldview, was completed just before his death and will be published in the near future. He will be missed.

More than 20 years ago, our firm was created based upon David’s research and the principles of Developmental Relationship Marketing (DRM). This is a summary of the foundation/principles of Ageless Marketing.

The origins of Ageless Marketing stem from the five basic premises of DRM that define the origins of behavior, and its general path across the lifespan. They increase marketers’ effectiveness in linking product messages to the hidden (unconscious) drivers of consumers’ marketplace behavior by revealing behavior predispositions in various periods across the lifespan.

Finally, the five premises contain benchmarks for testing the validity of what people report about their attitudes, needs and motivations. This is critical given that recent brain research indicates that all motivations are rooted outside the realms of consciousness. We can only speculate about the foundations of our behavior; thus overly relying on the literal meanings of consumers’ testimonies doubtlessly accounts for many marketing failures. 

First Premise:  Origins of behavior

A person’s worldviews, needs, motivations and general approaches to needs satisfaction are predisposed – not predetermined -- by her/his current season of life, and originate in five systems of motivating underlying values (MUV Values).  MUV systems, from which all behavior emerges, are biologically innate and constitute the basic building blocks of behavior. In effect, the five MUV systems are the DNA of behavior:

MUV Systems	Source of Needs, Motivations
Identity Values	Sense of Self, and differentiation, maximization and perpetuation of Self
Relationship Values	Connections for orientation, grounding, validation of Self, and resources for help in meeting needs; includes institutions and belief systems
Purpose Values	Commanding focus of Self’s energy output and efforts
Adaptation Values	Skills, knowledge, for fulfillment of the Self’s potential
Energy Values	Health and well-being of the Self in the physical, psychological domains

Click Image To Enlarge

Second Premise:  Origins of motivations

Urges to satisfy needs arise from root motivations that are activated by tensions between five sets of bipolar forces. The first force (objective force) in each set dominates behavior in the first half of life; the second force (subjective force) in each set dominates behavior in the second half of life.

MUV Values	First half of life		Second half of life
	Objective force		Subjective force
Identity	dependence vs.		autonomy
Relationships	materialism vs.		experiential
Purpose	egocentrism vs.		altruism
Adaptation	novelty vs.		habit
Energy		disengagement/escape vs.		engagement/involvement

Third Premise:  Domains of personal development

Personal development evolves in two domains of the self. These domains contain the roots of all developmental potential. The two developmental domains are:

• Physical domain - the organic Self, which encompasses all body systems. Primary development is completed in adolescence.  Secondary development continues throughout life in order to keep body systems and functions in healthy states.
• Psychological domain - the inorganic Self which encompasses the conscious and unconscious mind.   Broadly speaking, following infancy, the mental Self develops through three cognitive styles across the lifespan as follows:
  • Subjective style: the primary cognitive style in childhood causing children to frequently experience the products of their imagination as reality.
  • Objective style: the primary cognitive style in adolescence and young adulthood when Self is experienced as an extension of the world.  They do not experience reality as an integrated scheme of the whole.  Reality to them is unambiguous, with truth being absolute or independent of context.
  • Integrated style - the primary cognitive style of people in midlife or older.  This style reflects a complex integration of subjective and objective styles. Reality is seen in terms of relationships whose elements are in constant flux.  Meanings depend on context.  This nullifies absolutism and renders reality in “shades of gray.”

Fourth Premise: Keeping information flow to levels the conscious mind can manage

The brain resolves this problem by conducting information triage. The criterion the brain uses to determine what information will be sent to the conscious mind is the relevance of information to a person’s survival scenario, a matrix of needs whose satisfaction is vital to a person’s comfort and pleasure and avoidance of discomfort and pain. 

Click Image To Enlarge

Fifth Premise: Seasons of life – stages of personal development

There are four seasons of personal development. The first two are dominated by social (psychosocial) development needs; the last two by inner (psychospiritual) development needs.

Season	Developmental Focus Years	Survival Focus
Spring	Initial development, 0 - 22	Play (learning) Comedic mode: “everything will generally break in my favor.”
Summer	Vocational development, 18+ - 40+	Work (becoming somebody) Romantic mode: heroic – “I can do anything I set out to do.”
Fall	Shift to inner development, 38+ - 60+	Work-play (search for meaning) Tragic mode: “I can’t do as much as I once thought; who am I really?”
Winter	Integration of life experiences, 58+ - ?	Reconciliation (making sense of life) Ironic mode: “There’s good in most every bad, bad in most every good – c’est la via!”

-

Ageless Marketing is an excellent primer on connecting more effectively with boomers and older adults and further exploring DRM summarized above. Knowledge gained should result in a better understanding of whole brain, true-to-life models of customer behavior and consequently more effective links with targeted populations.

-

COMMENTARY:    Before you get too entangled with the concepts and terminology presented in the above material, I would like to make the following very important points which relate to the above:  

1. The marketing message is more important than the messenger.  
2. A brand is the sum total of all the experiences, both good and bad, and heiarchy of human needs that a brand represents and satisfies in the mind of the consumer.  
3. The brand experiences and heiarchy of human needs it fills become even more important as a consumer becomes older.   

Therefore, in order to fully understand the above material, we need to backtrack a bit, and you need to familiarize yourself with the science of consumer marketing, not just what you read in Marketing 101 about the four/five P's and marketing strategy and tactics.   What I am getting at, and something that I have preached for a long time, is that marketers need to understand how consumers think and what processes go on inside the mind of the consumer that will get them to trust a brand and finally make a buying decision.  This is the very essence of Developmental Relationship Marketing (DRM).  

-

Armed with the above valuable points and concepts, marketers will be in a better position to fine tune their brand marketing messages so they are more customer-centric if you are targeting the Baby Boomer generation.

-

Through the miracle of neuro imaging, brain researchers can now eavesdrop on the goings on between a person’s ears as thoughts are being formed and decisions made. While they don’t exactly see pictures,what they do see is radically changing our thinking about how motivations form, free will works, and information moves from our sensory receptors through the brain into the conscious mind.

-

What is being learned about human behavior in brain science or neuroscience, as well as in the hotly developing field of genetics, will inevitably change how companies view those who work for them and those to whom they market and sell things. However, it is not only genetics and brain science that will be changing how companies see workers and customers. Developmental psychology, which is a treasure trove of information about human behavior, though rarely drawn on in marketing, stands to assume an elevated role in business, especially in marketing. 

-

Marketing revolves around predictions of consumer behavior. The primary purpose of consumer research is to get information that enables predictions of what consumers need, want, and do. However, developmental psychology, which delves deeper into the human psyche,offers crucial insights into consumer behavior that cannot be fathomed by traditional consumer surveys, interviews, and focus groups. In fact, developmental psychology may help resolve an ironic problem present in current marketing strategies: Despite information technology that provides us with more information on customers than ever before, marketing success rates have fallen over the past decade.  Scary thought, isn't it?

-

Marketers' continuing preoccupation with youth and young adult markets makes no logical sense in scores of product lines and for thousands of companies.  The emergence of a New Customer Majority comprised of people 40 and older is the answer.   This seasoned group of consumers is 45 percent larger than those between the ages of 18 and 39 (123 million versus 85 million), and will become even more numerous over the next decadeand a half. A fact overlooked by the prevailing Madison Avenue mindset is that the majority rules in the marketplace as well as in politics. This New Customer Majority, not youth and pre-middle-aged adults, is the primary source of today’s leading views, values, and behaviors in the marketplace. This historic change in consumer behavior has made much of what once worked in marketing obsolete. It has changed the rules of marketplace engagement.

-
Adapting successfully to these circumstances requires a different mindset than the one that has long governed marketing. As many thought leaders in business have already recognized, marketing success increasingly depends on abandoning the traditional  quantitatively framed product-centric mind-set to adopt a qualitatively framed customer-centric mindset. However, not many yet have figured out how to do this.  

-

Customer relationship management (CRM) was supposed to be the silver bullet to accomplish effective customer-centric marketing, but has failed miserably.   CRM has become a more of a sales tool to assist salespeople track and qualify leads and communite with customers. Instead  of developing into a customer-centric marketing technology, all CRM has done is build a wall between the company and its customers, while creating more work for the salespeople.

-

Social media came along and has given birth to the era of brand engagement with consumers, but as you have found out from my numerous blog posts, I have often questioned the effectiveness of social media to sell much of anything because consumers view their social media pages as a very private almost holy social space, and advertising is considered very invasive and an infringement on that space.  So long as social network users continue to blockout and resist social media ads, I don't see how social network sites like Facebook will become a marketer's Holy Grail.   As I write this, social network sites like Facebook and Twitter are embarking on more aggressive advertising strategies and introducing advertising products to meet the needs of brand marketers and justify their huge stock valuations. Exposing social network users to even more ads is not the solution. When this experiment is finally over in about a year or two, I think you should revert back to this blog post and you will discover the reasons why it all happened.  

-

Since the social networks began selling ads, brand managers have encountered problems measuring the ROIs of their social media marketing campaigns.  Spending more on social media advertising only exasperates this problem. It piles on bad money on top of more bad money. It represents wasteful spending on advertising that simply will not work.  The smart ones, representing roughly 49% of brand managers have chosen to use social media the right way:  to increase brand awareness, increase fan engagement and brand influence, conducting marketing research through questionnaires and polls, and improving customer service.     

-

With a growing body of knowledge, evidence and new information from neuroscience with which to work, we are now able to fold back the layers of the conscious mind to reveal the very origins of customers’ needs, motivations, and behavior, a feat that is simply not possible in conventional consumer research methodologies.  In doing this, neuroscience responds to a long-standing deficiency in marketing that costs companies tens of billions of dollars annually due to misleading research and marketing blunders.

-

The spectrum of refracted images that results from neuroscience makes it clearer why consumer behavior has become less materialistic (less product-centered) and more metaphysical (more experience-centered).  This has occurred because for the first time ever, most adults are in the years when the forces of self-actualization needs (see below) exert decisive influences on lifestyle aspirations, buying decisions, and overall consumer behavior.  The marketer who gains an understanding of the dynamics of self-actualization will have a decided advantage in today’s markets over the marketer who doesn’t.

-

Thus far, marketing remains rooted primarily in the materialistic values (product-centered values) that generally hold the most sway over people in the pre-middle-age years of adulthood. Because of this, many members of the New Customer Majority feel marginalized by companies and their marketers. Perhaps no other single factor has done more to reduce the effectiveness of marketing.

-

Here's an incredible thought that marketers should take note of:  How a brand is perceived and what a marketing message means is more subjective in the older mind than is usually the case with younger minds. In fact, the older mind tends to be more resistant to marketers’ attempts to fully define the meaning, benefits, and values of a brand.  That's another scary thought for marketers to chew.  

-

Abraham Maslow, a leader in the field of human developmental psychology and developer of Maslow's Hierachy of Needs postulates that an older, more mature mind “resists enculturation” (i.e. enculturation is the process by which a person learns the requirements of the culture by which he or she is surrounded, and acquires values and behaviours that are appropriate or necessary in that culture). This disposition calls for subtler and more deferential approaches in addressing older markets. This is made more challenging by the fact that unlike the young who tend to perceive matters in more absolutist black-and-white perceptions, older people tend to perceive matters in shades of gray. Absolutist perceptions of reality are easier to play to because they are generally more closely tied to social consensus. Shades of gray perceptions are more subjective, thus pose a fuzzier target to hit among members of the New Customer Majority.

-

Maslow's Heirarchy of Needs

-

Empathy—identifying with and understanding another’s circumstances, emotions, feelings, and motives—is the very core of an authentic customer-centric mind-set.    The last season of life is a more fortuitous stage than many younger people believe is possible.  It comes only with maturation.  The blessings that can be one’s good fortune to experience in the mature stage of ones life at higher levels of psychological maturation include entry into a new dimension of human existence from which comes a steady flow of lofty experiences—what Abraham Maslow called peak experiences—and in which there arises enhanced coping abilities for dealing with any later life declines and losses that are inevitable. Of course, not everyone reaches such an advanced state of maturation. Nevertheless, because these aspects of self-actualization reflect perennial desires in life’s second half, the marketer who understands them is more likely to connect most deeply with the more than 123 million people who make up the New Customer Majority.

-

Bottomline, if you are marketing to the Baby Boomer generation you must employ more hollistic, socially conscience, and more subtle messages that run counter to the Generation Y or Millennial and Generation X cultural marketing approach.   To market the Millennial and Generation X,  I highly recommend that you read by blog post dated September 30, 2011 in which I talk about how to reach Generation X and Generation X.  Those two demographics require a Sensory Approach and Social Approach. 

-

Courtesy of an article dated March 5, 2012 appearing in MediaPost Pubications  Engage:Boomers  and the book titled Ageless Marketing by David B. Wolfe

 

Comments

[Tommy]

Dante,

Advertising to the New Generation (those 40+) and Baby Boomers requires an integrated marketing approach which utilizes both traditional and digital advertising.

Consider the three important points I mentioned in the above post:

+ The marketing message is more important than the messenger.

+ A brand is the sum total of all the experiences, both good and bad, and heiarchy of human needs that a brand represents and satisfies in the mind of the consumer.

+ The brand experiences and heiarchy of human needs it fills become even more important as a consumer becomes older.

The older the consumer is a more social conscience consumer. Less hype, more facts. Subtle messages, no hard sell. Concentrate on the overall consumer experience. Sustainable products.

Check my blog under Advertising, Demographics and Marketing for my posts on Boomers and other generational groups.

Thank you for your feedback, and hope you will return regularly.

Tommy

[Dante Yeyest]

Thanks for this long but comprehensive post! The audience today are wiser than ever. It is a constant challenge to try and capture their interest and attention. We need more marketing personnel to practice the tips you gave here. What about traditional marketing though? Can it still be done? Will it yield great results? Thanks!