After over 25 years in marketing, I learned that many targeting decisions aren’t driven by sound commercial logic.
They are driven by faulty logic, a lack of empathy, and the recurring fantasy that the consumer most attractive to marketers is automatically the most valuable one.
The same mistakes always come back, usually wrapped in a persuasive deck and introduced as “growth opportunities.” They are not. They’re just old errors in fresh packaging.
Here are the three biggest mistakes:
Being tyrannized by the youths
There is a sentence you always hear in marketing meetings, especially when the data suggests older consumers deserve more focus: “We need to recruit the next generation.”
And if you push back, someone will often add the supposedly decisive line: “After all, people over 50 won’t be around forever.”
In reality, it is just a polished way of ignoring the people currently paying the bills to chase the ones we find more exciting.
In many categories, older consumers have more spending power, buy more often, and are cheaper to reach efficiently. They often are the commercial center of gravity, not some sleepy legacy segment sitting politely in the corner.
And yet teams still talk as if older consumers are drifting into irrelevance.
They get thrown into a lazy catch-all bucket, like “50+,” as if a 52-year-old, a 64-year-old, and a 72-year-old are the same consumer.
Meanwhile, younger consumers are sliced into ever finer categories: 18-24, 25-34, and so on, as if the difference between 24 and 25 is a major anthropological event.
This is all because of an old fantasy: “Win them young and keep them forever”.
But that idea has aged far worse than the consumers it dismisses.
Today, churn is high, loyalty is brittle, and many rejuvenation efforts pull off the neat trick of irritating the current base without winning enough new buyers to compensate.
Marketers and agencies target people like themselves.
Targeting teams tend to drift toward people who feel familiar. In other words, they target people very much like themselves: urban, educated, connected, progressive, often with above-average buying power.
Meanwhile, the brand’s actual heavy buyers may be older, more mainstream, more suburban, less fashionable, or simply less enjoyable to imagine on a mood board.
Steve Harrison argues in Can’t Sell, Won’t Sell that it would not matter that marketers and agency people come from a narrow sociological profile, if they had unusually strong empathy.
