Dr. Joseph Coughlin, Director of the MIT Age Lab was the opening speaker at MaRS and the real inspiration for the mind set that there is huge opportunity to innovate as we progress with an aging world. I took great encouragement from what Coughlin said about what he calls the longevity paradox – a call to innovate as we manage our health and invent the things we will do (or need) later in life.

One of the questions posed in his talk was, “where are the care-giver networks of tomorrow going to come from?” I would add how are they going to work and what hand do we have in that now in designing innovative models. This harkened me back to Theodore Roszak in his “Longevity Revolution” when he talked about tomorrow’s “compassionate economy”. What is the work and the careers around “care giving” going to look like?

More questions than answers, but there are pockets of “collaboration for innovation” out there in communities around the world. It won’t take much to get involved in the conversation as we “envision the promise of longevity” together.

TAGlab’s web site Project page outlines remarkable examples of what digital technology can do as a positive contribution to the world. TAGlab is further example to me that the “promise of longevity”, and all the challenges associated with extended lifetimes, is an exploration point for intergenerational connectivity.

It’s a wonder that TAGlab hasn’t grabbed more headlines. Maybe they need a few more advocates. The Digital Life Histories project demonstrates the application of digital multimedia assisting those with cognitive impairment. This touched my interest given personal experience with my mother who lived with dementia later in her life. If you want to get inspired read some of the papers on the web site on this and other projects.

So why do we wait to record personal histories when a person gets to a state where perhaps memory gets in the mist? Years ago I recall tape recording a conversation with an 80 something woman who was a friend of my Grandmother. The technology was a small tape cassette and as valuable as it was to hear her stories from the 1930’s, the tape will most likely be unplayable one day. Where was TAGlab back when?

A vast range of products for mature consumers is up for grabs though – from smart phones, cars, and furniture to vacations, food and pet paraphernalia. The best general advice from the panellists regards marketing any of these product categories (including the stair lifts) is – don’t start by talking down to the audience using age as the starting reference point. People can get offended easily by the first impression you create if that’s where you start.

Market research that centers on buying behaviours of a well profiled individual through a lifetime cycle of customer relationship informs you more about preferences as a consumer matures. But what business actually spends the time to database their customer information?

One of the neat nuggets from Chris Wiegand of Jibestream Interactive was that new digital technologies can help profile and individualize product options for making qualified buying decisions. Of course the key question here is that depending on the product, is the person making the buying decision the older “end user” or someone younger on their behalf?

So picking up on one or two threads, my comment from the last posting, “there is no homogeneous nature to any age zone” was confirmed by more than one response to – how do I target my marketing to mature consumers? As Lina Ko of Boomerwatch got it right off the top (paraphrasing), “the Boomer generation is a 20 year spread, it’s a common mistake to apply cookie cutter marketing”. 

Include more in that thought. As I listened to the other panellists it became clearer to me that there are multiple aspects about this Boomer mix (as with any generation), that you need to overlay into the profiling of a particular target customer. Cultural differences, choice of language, life stage experience, gender preferences, value systems, buying behaviours.

Not to get lost in the focus here, there was much jibber at this event about how much did the use of social technologies count in marketing to an older demographic? The aspect of “technographic” profiling is well laid out in the book Groundswell (read up) and I guess the bottom line is that you really need to research your ideal Boomer customer before you make assumptions about their social media savvy.

We’ll see where this SERC panel takes us, but one thing I shared with Gerald is this tendency to discuss older consumers in broad terms. The front end question I have is, where do you draw a distinction around who are older consumers? Is there a magic moment when you’ve crossed an age zone? I suppose we can make that 45 plus, if you follow the targeting of Moses Znaimer’s Zoomer marketing strategy. Really?

But there is no homogeneous nature to any age zone and after a while the nauseous approach to broad stroked, age related stereotyping and patronizing gets in the way of the marketing message. There must be a top ten don’t do list of “off the mark” messaging for any business with a product or service selling to whatever age profile they think they have in sight.

The second symposium is April 30 at the Toronto based MaRS Discovery District. This event focus is on aging, care giving and wellness in the workplace, with an eclectic mix of case studies in innovation related to this business of aging.

Our aging process is the continuum – our life course. We all live it in different ways and leave it and at different times. Some way too early and some gracefully (or painfully) for up to a 100 years or more. The promise of our longevity in a general context, tends to be of a greater timeframe since history began to record. That’s normal now, right?.

 In our recent times we’re inclined to chunk and mark our lives in segments like a relay race, with flags flapping us on from adolescence to an “elder-escence”. What is that part of our life course supposed to look like? What are we hardly waiting for? This notion of planning for a retirement or some third age is just one part of a series of aging transitions. What’s after that? Maybe it’s some “nth degree dimension” that can wave on the final segment of that “elder-escence”.

Our life’s journey is our career, a “swiftly moving course, like the sun and the stars across the heavens”. What’s tomorrow’s normal?

Now that Actuarial Accountants, Financial Planners and politicians have opined on the matter, we can all come down off the ceiling and count our body parts. We haven’t lost a limb. By the time the change to the OAS take effect in 2023, (applied over six years to 2029), most of the Boomer cohort will be about 59 and older – and I’m sure they and those younger will have had more pressing issues to fret about.

If you look at the history of the Old Age Security Act (1952), the eligibility age was 70. It lowered to age 65 in the 1960’s. We’ve been adjusting this program, going back to 1927 when it was the Old Age Pensions Act – also deemed age 70. By the way, Finance Minister Flaherty was quoted saying, “this is a social program.. not a pension program”. Tell that to the folks who write the Service Canada web info where it’s called a pension.

Mincing words, pension plans are social plans, just like employment insurance. Hey, it’s all our money being re-circulated in the birthing of annual budgets.

Often these are the same who say that age discrimination is limiting their prospects for continued employment – and in the same breath say that they should be valued for their thirty years of experience and collective wisdom. Why should it be assumed that any generational  cohort creates or contributes value equally as a group?

If we stop loitering at the main intersections of complacency & generalization – or entitlement & reminiscence, maybe we might find ourselves in this world where we stand on the merit of who we are as individuals – not of a particular vintage of age but sharing the advantage across generations. That’s not to say we can deny, reverse or delay the aging process or that the associated stigmas and attitudes will dissolve overnight.

The upshot is that “aging demographics” issues are daily beginning to heat up the headlines and the business of aging as it were, has become everybody’s business – disagree or acknowledge as you will. I’m just nauseous from the messaging that some Boomers have engendered, that they alone are the bulge not to be ignored.

And then there were the weekly “cocktail hour” phone calls, with wide sweeping conversations from personal musings on the weeks events, to the tracings of family history, art, music, food and the neat things about the Canada that she loved.  I will miss those times, not to mention the countless lunch dates and “real time” cocktail hours in hideaway Toronto locales.

She had countless friends around the world and quietly worked at making connections, looking for shared interests on many levels. She could be gruff and sharp and she didn’t suffer fools gladly. But that was the charm. Because underneath it all she was a pussy cat who took the view – travel lightly, live simply, don’t complicate, appreciate the finer things.

And I think you can learn a lot from how people name their cats. With the backhanded humour that she had… Misery, Mayhem  and Muggins.

Make every moment…

In memory of Jane Gail Irvine.

As we created the picture for this later life commune, the economics of this future meant that unlike the high cost of formulated models as featured in Comfort Life, our overheads would be controlled to a level of what we could afford. I don’t think we thought much about what things would look like as we moved through the aging process. Would we always be 67 and mobile?

It all sounded great over a bottle of wine from our vintage point in our late 40’s and into our 50’s. If we sold our own homes in our early 60’s, we’d source one ideal location, convert a large home or build a new one; and talked about design concepts for customized interior spaces. But with any commune of six aging independent singles, did we think that someone would hurdle first into the need for assisted living beyond walk in bath tubs and stair lifts?

Several bottles of wine later, not one of us has made a move in this direction of creating commune. It’s our parents we are still working with on the assisted living and beyond issues.