Ad Agency Defines Buyers by Life Styles, Not By Age Anymore

It used to be that age had a lot to do with how we act and what we buy.

Now, stage could become important in how products are pitched to us, according to J. Walter Thompson, the ad agency that bills $3.8 billion annually worldwide.

When they talk about stages, they aren’t talking about second childhoods or mid-life crises. They’re talking about say, a young parent, married and whose oldest child is preteen. That young parent could be 25 years old or 50.

“We no longer define parents in terms of their own age, but by the age of their children,” said Peter Kim, who heads JWT’s consumer behavior department. “We have found that studies based on age such as 50-plus, the graying of America or life-style studies, such as the yuppies, are obsolete as we enter the 1990s,” said James B. Patterson, chief executive officer of J. Walter Thompson USA. “If we think of people in terms of their life stage rather than their age or even socioeconomic position, we will have a more accurate window into their needs and desires.”

In the postwar years, life was fairly cut and dried. A young man got a job, married and started a family all before he was 30. He stayed married through his retirement and until he died at 69. The young woman spent her life as a homemaker.

Not so today and not well into the 1990s, says Kim. Today, he says, young people will go through many phases between the time they leave school and die, at average age 80 by the year 2000.

There are the singles, broken into four groups: at-home singles, young adults living with their parents; starting-out singles, young adults sharing or supporting their own apartments; mature singles, older adults either never married or divorced, and left-alone singles, widowed seniors or older divorced adults, 77% of them women.

There are two types of couples: young couples recently married and childless, and the empty nesters, those left alone because their children are grown.

In addition to young parents, the parental life stage includes mature parents and single parents. Mature parents are married and their oldest dependent child is a teen-ager or adult. Single parents are unmarried parents rearing their own children.

The whole thrust of this, of course, is how to target the markets. Empty-nesters and mature parents, just in case you’re wondering, are the largest groups in the country, 65 million total now and 77 million in 1995.

The 33 million mature parents in the country control $650 billion in income while the 32 million empty nesters control $520 billion.

By 1995, when baby boomers age, mature parents’ ranks and income are expected to swell by 24% and empty nesters’ by 14%.

Move over, yuppies.

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