How to Market to Older Adults in 2025 With Age of Majority’s Jeff Weiss | The AgeTech Podcast S4E21

Keren Etkin: Welcome to the first ever live recording of the AgeTech podcast. We have with us today Jeff Weiss, the Jeff Weiss, I should say, who is a, an expert on marketing to older adults. Jeff, welcome to the show.

Jeff Weiss: I can’t believe you got me as your first live guest. I’m so excited to be here and to chat about, a topic that you and I spent a lot of our, a lot of our time, discussing and dealing with. So thank you for having me.

Keren Etkin: Thank you for agreeing to do this and being such a good sport. I wanna start by. Playing Devil’s advocate for a minute and just asking why do we even need special marketing to older adults? Why can’t all the big brands like Coca-Cola or Nike just do what they normally do with their ads and hope that it also serves the older population?

Jeff Weiss: That’s the big, $64,000 question that’s been around for, a long time. I did a, when I did my MBA many years ago, over 30 years ago, I did a paper, this is back in 1991, on the opportunity to market to senior citizens. And, the opportunity was back there then, and it still exists today.

And, it’s just marketers and businesses don’t understand older adults and they are afraid because of all the stigmas and stereotypes that they just, they can’t wrap their heads around it. And, we’ll go through and talk today about, stats and figures and say, here’s the opportunity, but it, it’s oh yeah, we get it.

But no, we gotta go younger. We’ve gotta get people and they’ll be our customers for life and we get them when they’re 18. And are more finicky now more than ever and less brand loyal. But it’s kind, if the issue wasn’t there, you and I wouldn’t be in business, we’d be doing other things.

So fortunately it is there.

Keren Etkin: Absolutely. We’re having this conversation in March of 2025. How is marketing to older adults done in this day and age? I’m sure it’s different than what was done in the nineties or even 10 or 15 years ago.

Jeff Weiss: You, you would think it’s getting better. I’ll say that, but there’s still a long way to go. And, I get this question all the time, how do you market to older adults? And then when when you put in the year 2025 though, it made me pause and think, because, I’m the youngest of the boomers, so the boomers are now 60 and over, which means that you’ve got Gen X who are now 50, 55 plus. It’s changed in terms of who older adults are. And, one of the questions that we, we ask, we, when we launched seven, eight years ago, it was like, okay, what’s the age we wanna define as old?

And we said 55, but what is that today? Because people are, changing, they’re generally healthier, living longer, working longer, all that stuff as they get older. At what age does someone become an older adult? And then, how did those needs change? So when you, I’m just curious, when you talk about older adults, is there an age, someone said what age does it start?

When someone’s an older adult? What would you tell them?

Keren Etkin: So I like to use the age of retirement as the cutoff, so around the age of 65. Not because I think people suddenly fall off a cliff and become old, but because I think that is like a major milestone in life and for many people that is almost a crisis. And it’s definitely a time, like retirement is definitely a time where things change for better or worse.

Jeff Weiss: Absolutely. Yeah, we could do a whole show on retirement and all the challenge with that. So I think what’s happening is that, as the aging, the older population. Gets older, it’s just the complexity around people, whether they’re 55, 60, 65 older. You think about, your parents, your grandparents, what they were like versus for me example, if I look at me now as 60 versus my father, at 60, like unite and day.

So I think the complexities around people as they age are much greater now. And, trying, like a lot of people think, oh, if I just, if I wanna market to older people, here’s the same message, the same imagery and all that. And it’s even more difficult now. So I think we’re starting to see companies and brands getting better at it, but the complexities are so much more difficult now.

It’s really difficult to do well.

Keren Etkin: Would you say that marketing to 65 plus or 55 plus is difficult because people just don’t know how to segment the market and they are doing it like marketing to 20 to 40 year olds, as a, like a monolith.

Jeff Weiss: Like trying to market by age. And I don’t care whether you’re talking about, someone who’s 65 or someone who’s 25 you can’t do it because the, there’s so many things involved. You might be 25 but have a lot more things in common with someone who’s 50 than with someone your own age.

It could be at very different places, different life stages. So I think there are so many different variables that come into play. Thinking about marketing by age is never gonna work. And again, I think. The main reason I think, why it’s tough to market Toler, why Branson is tough to mark Toler adults is just because of all the stereotypes and stigmas that continue to be out there, right?

And it’s you think some of these would be retired and we can go through some, and then we call ’em the dirty dozen myths of aging. But to me, that’s the key thing. It’s like you can put all the facts and figures and data in front of people, but they always think about, oh no, they’re old so they can’t use technology.

That is so far behind us, yet most people don’t, most marketers don’t even wanna, won’t even wanna admit that, right?

Keren Etkin: Absolutely. And I think one of the things that you’ve done really well at age of majority is like you build this, these user personas. By the way, you should check out Jeff’s reports on age of majority. They’re free for everyone to read, and they’re super helpful in just wrapping your head around the different personas of older consumers today.

And at the end of the day, when you’re marketing to them, they are consumers. They’re not patients, they’re not your grandmother, they’re consumers.

Jeff Weiss: Yeah. So to that point we did this we did a few years ago, and it’s still very relevant where, we got, I got tired of people saying how do you market to someone who’s 55 versus 65? And it, there’s no answer to that, right? We did some research and we asked questions that were related to people’s health and their attitudes towards health, what they’re doing what their attitudes were towards aging.

A bunch of different questions that weren’t. Demographic based, they were more lifestyle based. And that we came up with 11 different personas. We call it actually the personage segmentation model. And that is, the report is available on our website. And basically there’s 11 different segments or personas of older adults that are really split based on how they responded to.

A bunch of those questions. So for example, you’ve got some people who are producers and these are people that just wanna get things done. And they could be 55, they could be 90, right? You’ve got others that are health battlers and they might be dealing with, as you get older you tend to have more health issues and some people are very reactive, to what they’re doing, and others are proactive. So there’s a bunch of different things that come into play. There are enablers. I can’t remember all of them, but it’s a lot better to use that type of model. the agent stuff comes out of it, which is great when you’re trying to think about how do you actually reach these people, mainly through digital efforts and things like that.

But age shouldn’t be driving who you’re going after. It’s gotta be all the other things that are more lifestyle and life stage specific. And that’s what that personage model does. And it really helps because you might have different messaging depending on the category of the brand.

You might have different messaging that works for one group that you can target, but very different messaging for another group based on their needs. And it always comes down to what their needs are. And if that’s the case and you’re using, targeted digital ads as an example, you can have very specific messaging for one group, specific imagery, specific offers versus what you have for another group.

So it’s very powerful.

Keren Etkin: Absolutely. So when you segment the market, they always say as a marketer, you should be where your audience is. So where are all these personas hanging out? What channels work for them? I.

Jeff Weiss: Oh you know what? That there’s no one solution that works for all, right? I think people are, they’re probably on, on this podcast and it’s I want the answer. How do I reach these people? And a lot of times it’s oh, like they, they develop a product and they’re trying to sell direct to consumer, and they spend all this money on Facebook because older adults are on Facebook.

Unfortunately, older adults aren’t looking to buy products on Facebook. For the most part. They’re looking to connect with people they know. It really varies by category. There’s no simple answer to it. And the channels you use really depend on your goals.

So are you trying to raise awareness? Are you trying to educate people? Are you trying to drive people to purchase? Are you trying to sell something in a local, very specific area versus a large area? And budget always comes into play because, for example, television, tv, advertising is still. Very effective, primarily at kinda raising awareness, but also at driving people to websites. If you’re looking for someone to see a TV ad, immediate buy a product, not gonna happen. But it costs a lot of money to advertise. A lot of brands, particularly startups, can’t do that. But television is still an option, but the things like email, if you’ve got a good email list, email is still very effective and reaching. adults and getting them to take action. Direct mail can be very effective as well. Particular ’cause you can target by, whether it’s, zip code or depending on where you are in the world.

Very targeted in terms of who you’re going after. I’m not sure if you have these in Israel now, but you know, in, in North America a lot, there’s a lot of community newspapers, right? So for specific areas I’m in Toronto now, so there’s different community newspapers depending on the area. Those papers are read more front to back than any other newspaper out there because it’s like local news, right? Digital like websites are still your website better be good. In terms of navigation, in terms of content, but also older adults are more concerned about security and things like that. And also they wanna be able to, if they want to speak to someone, and there, there’s, with AI coming in and bots and everything, it can be very frustrating, more so for an older adult than a younger one. But websites are key. Digital ads can be very targeted. And then the other piece, and we’ve just done a really large kind, I think, breakthrough study on social media and social media influencers that shows there’s a huge opportunity to use influencers online to really target specific older adults for depending on what product you have.

Keren Etkin: And do these influencers, do they have to be older influencers or will a 60 plus year old recent retiree who’s an active ager, the producer type, let’s say, will they respond well to a funny GenZ’er selling something in a funny way?

Jeff Weiss: What would you think? I’ll tell you what the answer is, but do you think there’s a

Keren Etkin: No.

Jeff Weiss: between the age of someone and the age of the influencer they’re following?

Keren Etkin: My gut feeling would say that yes, like he, he would, they would prefer looking, seeing someone who looks like themselves.

Jeff Weiss: Yeah that’s exactly what we found. So we split people 18 to 34, 35, 54, and 55 plus. And younger adults tend to follow influencers who are younger and then older adults over half of the influencers that someone 55 and older follow are over 55. So they, because for older people, in particular older adults, relatability content is still the number one thing.

You’ve gotta have good content that makes ’em worthwhile to follow you, but relatability, they have to be able to relate to people. And they can relate more to older people than they can to younger ones. Doesn’t mean they’re not following, they’re not necessarily following ’em, but they tend to follow, you tend to follow people that are more kind of your age that you can relate to.

Which actually brings me to one of the pre-submitted questions we had received from our audience. Someone had asked, if you’re trying to market to the 55 plus demographic, why not hire someone or multiple people on your team who are from that demographic who will be relatable?

Yeah. Firstly, I totally agree that when you’re mar, when you’re marketing when you’ve got a product or service that you’re marketing to older adults, you better include them as you’re developing the product, as you’re testing the product. There’s too many times when I’ll speak to someone, particularly more startups, but it happens with larger companies.

It’s like, why did you start this business? Oh, because my grandmother had this specific issue, so I developed a product that beats my grandmother’s needs. Which is great for their grandmother. Night might not be that applicable to other people. Whether you need to involve people, and I don’t care what age it is, but particularly with older adults, you need to evolve, involve older adults. When you’re developing and testing your product, it’s crazy not to. And for the cost and effort to do it, you’ve gotta do it. But hiring someone, it makes sense. But I remember back in the heyday when, I hate to say when the internet was just starting, and there were, it was like, oh, what are we gonna do on the internet?

What are we gonna do online? It’s let’s hire this young person because they’re online, they must know what they’re doing. Just because they’re online doesn’t mean they know strategy or anything. And it’s the same in, in terms of hiring older people great. But they have to know who the audience is.

And if your marketers in particular. wanna get diversity is great, inclusion is great, but a good marketer should be able to market to someone who’s 65 and someone who’s 25 or 10. It’s kinda, not bringing in your personal bias. So yeah, I encourage people to bring in older adults and to be ambassadors, to be influencers and things like that.

But again, there’s criteria that you’ve gotta follow just, and not to say, because you’re old, come on, join the team. That doesn’t work for me.

Keren Etkin: Absolutely, and I would also be wary of having the one gray haired person on the team and just going to them and

Jeff Weiss: yeah.

Keren Etkin: expecting them to represent the entire older population.

Jeff Weiss: No. Which is why you need to have, again, the voices of inclusion of, firstly it comes down to it’s, pure marketing 1 0 1, right? It’s who are you targeting based on their needs and what benefits they’re looking for? Who are you competing against?

What are the alternatives and what’s kinda your point of difference that’s relatable and meaningful and different, and and beneficial to your end user. And, unless you do that work upfront, you could be spinning your wheels, right? So you really need to understand and involve people who, some are gonna be in your target, some not.

And that’s how you narrow it down.

Keren Etkin: Exactly. This actually brings me to, to my next question is marketing technology to older adults different than marketing other consumer goods and services.

Jeff Weiss: What do you mean? Just maybe clarify what you mean by

Keren Etkin: If I were to market a new wearable or a new app, is it different than marketing shoes?

Jeff Weiss: Really good question. Wearable is a great example. One of the, one of the, one of the things that we tell people in the kiss of death is if I’ve, I don’t wear a wearable ’cause I like my watch that my wife gave me when we got married 30 years ago. But, she wears one and my son does daughter-in-law. And you say this is for you because you’re old, that’s the kiss of death, right? So if it’s a wearable, for example, you really should be marketing based on the needs of who your end users are. Now those needs may be different for someone that’s older versus someone that’s younger, but market it based on the needs and it’ll just appeal to more to people who are older versus younger, if that makes sense.

So for example I’m trying to think with the wearable, sleep well. Sleep’s important her, but sleep, we know sleep is really important for older adults. So if you are wearable, if it’s an aura ring for example, then there might be things that messaging in terms of how you market older at altered different than what would you do for younger adult, maybe that you were ranked but you know, an Apple watch or something like that.

Some of the features might be different, but basically your marketing based on needs and not by age, if that makes sense.

Keren Etkin: It makes absolute sense. So when you are sort of reviewing other people’s marketing, like the Aura Ring or the Apple Watch, can you tell the difference just based on the messaging, if this campaign was targeting older adults versus millennials?

Jeff Weiss: That’s a good question. Generally not by messaging, where you find a big difference is the imagery they use, which is the other thing, right? So it always kills me when you’ve got a product which is clearly being, I’m trying to think of an example clearly, where it’s being used by someone who’s older, yet the models of the users they’re showing are younger and it’s like people can’t relate to it.

Older adults want to be able to relate to someone who they can see like themselves, and ideally it’s aspirational. I’ll give you an example. It always kills me, Peloton. Which saw better days, peloton, when you look at their marketing, it was very much focused on younger adults. And, but it was like $2,500, $3,000. So who has the money to buy that? It was mainly older adults. I bought one for my wife for the holidays years ago. And, she would go on there and use it. And my wife is, in her sixties and she’s in good shape. But she would get on there and I’m not a biker at all, so I wouldn’t do it, but she’d get on there and it’d be a class with 500, a thousand people.

And the instructor would be like some 25-year-old without an ounce of fat on their body. And the people, spinning with her generally tended to be young. So she would get on there and after half an hour, she’d look and it was like she was demotivated, right? Because she was like in the last 10 percentile of the class.

And she’s she can never. See herself being as fit as that instructor. My son on the other hand, who was, 25 at the time, I guess we’d get on there and I don’t even think he’s, he is, he’s not even as good shape as my wife. But he could get on there and for half an hour he’d get a boost.

And he’s looking at this instructor, he is wow. It’s motivating, it’s inspirational because if I, kind of cycle, I can, my body can look like that and, he can get enough power and speed over half an hour and he can be in the top part of the class, but he’s not the one buying it.

So it’s there, there’s different factors that come into play messaging, but also, the imagery can really important in terms of who you’re going after. And imagery is a really tough thing to get. You might have seen my post there’s one guy you see around the world, he’s like the poster older adult, you know who he is, right?

And I’ve seen him in commercials from everything from adult diapers to, to where he is, a professor in a lab or something like that. It’s crazy, there’s a real of art to to doing it. But a lot of brands don’t wanna invest in that. So you see the same imagery over and over again, and it’s just not relatable to people.

Yeah, I mean when I see these models slash actors over and over, I’m happy for them that they work consistently. But I’m also sad because it makes me feel like people are not being creative.

exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Keren Etkin: You mentioned the Peloton example is a great example for the user slash buyer disparity. ’cause I understand that you have purchased the Peloton, but your son was one of the users in the household.

Jeff Weiss: Yeah.

Keren Etkin: And I wonder, there’s obviously many startups who build a product for the older user.

But they intend to market to the family caregiver, the adult child.

Jeff Weiss: yes.

Keren Etkin: How do you crack that code?

Jeff Weiss: Oh, that’s another big question. And we’ve done a lot of work ’cause we see it in, you see it a lot in we’ll call it senior living communities. And just by the way, senior, language is so important. Senior is a word that most older adults do not like at all. And we’ve done a bunch of research and work in senior living communities.

Their number one barrier, I think that industry has, is their name. People have no desire to move into a senior living, living residence, even if it’s the villages in Florida, if you know about them, 130,000 people. And, but you know, you call that a senior living community, I don’t wanna do it.

If you’re a caregiver and I’m a caregiver, my mother’s. Gonna be 95 in a couple months. The dynamics between a caregiver, usually it’s a son or a daughter, or and a son-in-law, daughter-in-law, and a parent could be a grandparent. The dynamics and all the variables that exist in that caregiver relationship mean that no, there’s no one kind of relationship that’s the same, right?

There’s so many variables. Is that older adult, can living with you or not living their own with the spouse? What’s the financial situation? What’s their attitude about living at home versus living somewhere there’s so many different pieces and things involved.

It’s really tough, again, to have one, one answer that works in terms of how do you reach both caregivers and care recipients? We know that one of the things we recommend all the time is that if you can facilitate the right discussion between. Caregiver and the care recipient, that’s half the battle because trying to have these discussions, and I’ll give you a personal example in a minute, can be really difficult.

I’ll go back to my mother, and this is probably, I don’t know, six, seven years ago. And she had actually, she was living on her own in a condo and she fell and she, she was alone. Fortunately, she was able to get up, not like I’ve fallen, I can’t get up, but you know, she’s able to get to the phone and get some help.

Thank goodness that could happen. And she didn’t have, a bracelet or anything on her. So I was sent as the youngest of four kids, I was sent to go have the conversation with mom. And I remember specifically going to have breakfast with her. breakfast. She goes, I know why you’re here.

And the answer’s no. And my mother is like the nicest person, but when you talk about being stubborn, that was it. And we chatted and I said, think about it. If you had fallen and couldn’t get to the phone. It could be days before, you know someone finds you.

So she said, I’m not gonna wear those things, because to her wearing that means that she’s old, even though she was 90 and it’s the next thing towards death, right? And she wouldn’t do it. So we came up with a solution and I had, numbers of her friends in the condo, stuff like that. But trying to have that discussion with her, it was tough, right?

So brands kinda help make that happen is key. And just before I talk a couple other things with that, funny now because now she’s moved into a retirement residence and she wears one and she’s oh yeah, everyone wears one here. So that’s what happened. But the o the other thing to keep in mind is that, there are different influencers, whether it be social media or not. Who can, you wanna rely on? So for example, for hearing aids, a doctor is key, right? So you wanna get the doctor speaking to that older adult who needs it. To talk about the need for it. It could be a lawyer, depending on what it is. There are different influencers, people, professionals, lawyers, doctors whatever the case that you can use also to get to kind of work in your favor if you’re trying to reach one or both of those groups.

Keren Etkin: Got it. So you don’t necessarily need to find a specific influencer with hundreds of thousands or millions of followers but you want to have the trusted, professional persona delivering your message.

Jeff Weiss: Yeah, because if you think about and we’ll talk more about the social media influencers, but the ones who have big followings are more in areas like, like I said, food, entertainment, fashion, beauty. Those aren’t really things that where a caregiver is gonna be involved that much.

You’re talking about more serious stuff and you’re probably gonna want people who have influence maybe not as big numbers. If you can find them and you’re, you can afford them and they work with you, great. But you wanna encourage kind of engagement and get that discussion going so that, if you’re the caregiver and you’re having that discussion with the care recipient, then at least there’s some common ground to work with. And also you, ideally you want that care recipient to be saying, Hey, maybe it’s time for me to consider this hearing aid for me to move into a community, whatever the case may be. So that’s where trusted people can come into play quite a bit.

Keren Etkin: Absolutely. Speaking of trusted people one of the questions that we got from the audience was about investing in referrals as a primary marketing slash growth channel.

Jeff Weiss: Yes.

Keren Etkin: does that work? Yeah.

Jeff Weiss: It can, there’s referrals and there’s word of mouth, right? We’ve done a bunch of research really, regardless of age, word of mouth is still, recommendations from friends and family is still number one, usually amongst all age groups, in terms of where you’re getting advice and things on referrals can work.

But it’s partly dependent on, again, the category you’re working in. And it comes back to, I was just talking about that, the referral is only as good as how trustworthy that person is. So if a referral is coming from a doctor, from a health professional, those tend to be higher up. And again, I can’t remember, we, we asked for trustworthiness of different people, all the way from a health professional down to, the person fixing my car in the auto shop.

Trustworthiness isn’t as high. So referrals can be great, but you really have to think about the level of trust that individuals make the referral has. Whether they’re real or whether they’re in, whether they’re in person or online. That’s really important to understand.

Otherwise referrals can be tough.

Keren Etkin: It makes, yeah, it makes a lot of sense that you are your primary care physician that you’ve been seeing for two decades.

Jeff Weiss: you think about how many companies and brands are trying to get the attention doctors and health professionals, and nurses. It’s I. They have no time. There’s not enough doctors around and for them to sit down. Oh, yeah. I saw this, the sales rep come in and Yeah, they recommended this for you.

It’s great. It doesn’t happen. Again, ideally what happens from a marketing perspective is that patient comes in, whether it’s the, the older adult and they might be with their caregiver and they bring it up. And then the doctor in this case can refer to it.

But it’s, if you can get referrals, they’re great from the right people, but it’s really tough to do. It can be very expensive.