The Hucksters See Gold in That Gray Hair. Yes, the Peter Pan Generation Is Hitting the Big...

By ROBERT A. ROSENBLATT

April 14, 1996 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

WASHINGTON —

At Ford Motor Co., the marketing types have developed a new niche for their minivans. Moving beyond the mainstay market of parents with young children, they are pitching the boxy vehicles to older-but-fitter adults who don’t have kids but need the space to stow camping and sailing gear.

At Dr. Roger Salisbury’s Men’s Center for Aesthetic Surgery in New York, the growing list of cosmetic surgery candidates includes a significant new sub-category. Many patients are anxious, middle-aged men who not only want to look better, but feel they must improve their appearance to stay competitive in the job market.

And on Wall Street, specialists in investment products have discovered that aging customers who flinch at the term “retirement planning” respond more favorably if a different label is attached. So they are packaging their mutual funds as “lifestyle investments,” and customers are snapping them up.

America’s baby boomers have long been a marketing gold mine for purveyors of all manner of goods and services. But as the boomers reach the peak of their affluence in middle age--the oldest among them turn 50 this year--they can be a particularly tough sell when it comes to products traditionally associated with aging.

To succeed, some savvy marketers are refining the art of creative deception: Rather than confront this notoriously self-absorbed generation with evidence of its own aging, they are preserving the collective fable that the boomers are still young, hip and rebellious--despite the grayer hair and thicker waistlines.

For example, it’s no secret that the increasingly popular sport-utility vehicles, which are built to traverse muddy roads and dusty deserts, are used mostly on suburban highways. But they reinforce one of the boomers’ most cherished self-images.

“They say one thing: ‘I’m free, I’m independent and I make my own road . . . although I might weigh 35 pounds more than I did at age 25 and need to take a pillow because my back hurts,’ ” said Rebecca Chekouras, research director at Age Wave, a marketing and consulting firm in Emeryville, Calif.

Jeff Ostroff, a 43-year-old entrepreneur in Plymouth Meeting, Pa., said that the desires of many boomers sharply conflict with the responsibilities of middle age. “We are really interested in trying to have it all and doing it all,” Ostroff said, “but we have to grapple with the idea that maybe it’s not possible.”

In an effort to better plumb the boomer psyche, corporate America turned out in force at the American Society on Aging’s recent convention in Anaheim, an event usually replete with seminars on Medicare, nursing homes and senior centers.

Some of this year’s most crowded sessions were devoted to the “future shock” of an aging marketplace, tailoring financial planning to tomorrow’s retirees and “looking your best at any age.”

More than 160 corporations sent executives to participate in a special section called the Business Forum, where they heard gerontologists and marketers explain the new world of older boomers.

“Over the next 20 years, the business community will target everything toward the boomers,” said John Menefee of Watson Wyatt Worldwide, a corporate benefit and consulting firm. Serving the needs of aging boomers will be “the growth industry of the 21st century,” he predicted.

The boomers are those 76 million Americans born in the years from 1946, when births exploded above the 3 million level for the first time, through 1964, the last year before births turned down.

This could be an emotionally painful year for many of the oldest boomers, including President Clinton, Dolly Parton and Reggie Jackson, all of whom hit their 50th birthday this year. Others turning the Big Five-Oh this year include Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Cher, Jim “Catfish” Hunter, Michael Milken, Pat Sajak and Ben Vereen.

It’s little wonder that the boomers are seen as a lucrative consumer market. Not only do they outnumber other age cohorts, they are educated--25% are college graduates--and more than 20% have incomes of more than $50,000.

Targeting products and services at the boomers “has been profitable for many marketers,” American Demographics magazine said. “After all, it was the baby boomers who bought Hula Hoops in the 1950s, crowded colleges in the 1960s and sent the price of housing soaring in the 1970s and 1980s.”

What is distinct now, however, is the boomer demand for goods that recognize the reality of age--but at the same time deny it.

It is as if an entire generation of Americans who once stood at the barricades of protest and proclaimed, “Don’t trust anyone over 30,” now want business to help them deceive themselves about the implications of nearing 50.

Big business is more than happy to play along.

Boomers made blue jeans, once worn largely by cowboys and laborers, their national uniform, and they’re not about to give them up. But without making an issue of it, jeans makers have been introducing new lines that are noticeably bigger in the seat.

Boomer music, instead of fading away, still dominates the airwaves. Mick Jagger might be a 52-year-old grandfather, but the popularity of the Rolling Stones remains high among his contemporaries. “I have a hard time believing Mick Jagger is over 50,” said Cathi-Lynne Ames, a 40-year-old marketing specialist in West Granby, Conn.

The demand for “classic rock” has given rise to radio stations categorized by decade: ‘60s stations for the first wave of boomers, ‘70s music for the post-Woodstock set and ‘80s fare for the trailing edge.

Some business executives see boomer buyer preferences as a massive exercise in self-delusion.

Boomers “are going to get old, and they just don’t like that idea,” observed John Niblack, executive vice president for research and development at Pfizer Inc., the pharmaceutical firm.

While vigorous exercise and a healthy diet can mitigate some of the effects of aging, it can’t reverse them. For those passing age 45, the incidence of high blood pressure, diabetes, heart problems and other ailments rises sharply.

Pfizer and other drug companies are rushing to develop new products to deal with osteoporosis in women and enlarged prostates and impotence in men. The goal is to keep them “healthy and active further into old age than any other generation,” Niblack said.

But the clock can’t be turned back permanently. “Eventually,” he said, “they are going to fall apart.”

Plenty of boomers, however, are willing to believe otherwise.

Dr. Robert Arnot, a physician and TV commentator, revives the myth of eternal youth in his book, “Guide to Turning Back the Clock,” which sold a hefty 70,000 copies in hardcover last year and is now out in paperback. Arnot proposes that a combination of diet and exercises will restore aging bodies to the state they were in during their 20s.

He tells readers his formula “can set back your biological age, like rolling back the miles on a car’s odometer.”

For those who simply want to look younger, the waiting list grows at Dr. Salisbury’s plastic surgery clinic in New York, where male boomers queue up for eye tucks and face-lifts.

“Most men are not frivolous about this--it’s not that they have an 18-year-old girlfriend,” said Dr. Salisbury, who is head of plastic surgery at New York Medical College.

“A patient will say, ‘I eat a low-fat diet and I jog, but because of the bags under my eyes, it looks like I stay out all night and drink, although I don’t. I’m afraid my boss thinks I’m getting too old for the job.’ ”

Boomers not only want to feel and look young, they want to “drive young” too. Not for them the boat-like Cadillacs and Buicks their parents drove when they ascended to the heights of middle-age prosperity.

Auto makers cite a surge of “lifestyle” purchases. Sport-utility vehicles and minivans, unheard of in 1980, are the fastest-growing segments of the market.

Aging boomers are camping in wilderness areas, rafting down raging rivers, traversing steep inclines on mountain bikes and generally “doing things today you wouldn’t have thought of a 50-year-old doing,” said Steve Lyons, Ford’s marketing manager.

“One of the statistics that boggles my mind,” Lyons said, “is that 25% of the people who buy minivans are over the age of 45 with no children at home.”

The “lifestage” buying patterns of prior generations, with aging customers moving up to bigger, fancier four-door sedans, has given way to “lifestyle” purchases by baby boomers who act like they’re much younger than the calendar indicates, he said.

Businesses who managed to lose their grip on the boomer market are scrambling now to refine their marketing approach. A prominent example is Pier 1 Inc., a chain that prospered in the ‘60s and ‘70s selling cheap pillows, wicker chairs and pungent incense to boomers furnishing their first apartments.

At some point, the generational love affair ended. “The message from our customers was, ‘We changed and you hadn’t,’ ” Pier 1 Chairman Clark Johnson said.

The firm has been aggressively upgrading its merchandise mix to recapture the pocketbooks of boomers. Pier 1 pillows were improved from cheap fabric to silk. Basic wicker gave way to well-built chaise lounges. The incense disappeared, replaced by not-so-cheap decorative candles now burning fashionably in boomer kitchens and bathrooms across the country.

The same marketing lessons have been learned within the investment community.

“We clearly recognize the baby-boomer market as a demographically and behaviorally different financial marketing segment, and try to speak to them in language they would understand,” said John Michel, a marketing manager at Merrill Lynch.

Boomers are saving at only a third the rate they would need to maintain their current lifestyles in retirement. Because they offer such a huge, untapped market, they will “be good for all of the financial services industry,” Michel said, particularly for those who tailor their products to boomer preferences.

Several major mutual fund families are promoting the idea of “lifestyle” investing, which stresses different combinations of stock and bond funds, depending on the age of the investor.

“If you’re age 40 and want to enjoy your retirement, you reached this page just in time,” proclaims Twentieth Century Mutual Funds in a recent newspaper ad targeted at boomers.

“The Age of Aquarius is better prepared mentally than financially for retirement,” joked Roger Hindman, the partner in charge of employee retirement and financial education at Price Waterhouse.

“There is a latent hope that something magical will happen to help them,” he said. “They will inherit the money they need or get astronomical rates of return on their investments or suddenly get a big promotion and have lots more salary to save.”

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Your Basic Boomer

Oldest: Born in 1946

Youngest: Born in 1964

College graduates: 25%

Children: 1.9 per average household

Income: 28% of households earn more than $50,000

Ethnic makeup: 75.2% white, 11.8% black, 8.9% Hispanic, 3.3% Asian, 0.8% American Indian

Location of residence: 76% urban, 24% rural

Birthplace: 90% native born, 10% immigrants

Living in California: 9.8 million

BOOMERS ARE THE BIGGEST