Brands must adapt rapidly themselves to mature consumers : “Senior Design” is the solution!

“Design for the young and you exclude the old. Design for the old and you include everybody.” 

It is not easy to put oneself in someone else’s shoes, especially if this person is older than you are. The individual alone experiences such internal changes. Furthermore, the changes are slow and are spread out over decades. Identifying them helps to understand their implications for marketing to the over 50s.

It is difficult to determine precisely at what age the different phenomena of deterioration come to be more pronounced; it depends on the individual. As David Lebreton has written: ‘Ageing is a slow and imperceptive process. A person moves gently from one day to the next, from one week to the next, from one year to the next; the events of daily life punctuate the flow of the day, not the awareness of time…wear builds up on the face, enters the tissues, weakens the muscles, reduces energy, but without trauma, without sudden rupture…the ageing process advances at walking pace.’ Nonetheless, one can claim that the age of fifty is a significant marker throughout the world.

Let me just describe what occurs with one of our senses :

Sight 

Eyesight declines from one’s youngest years. It reaches its maximum capacity before the age of 10. From then on it declines. After 40, the crystalline lens tends to yellow and harden while the pupil contracts; opening and closing becomes slower. This contraction requires more external light (two to three times more than that required by adolescents). From the age of 50, it is said that nearly 90% of people require spectacles (long-sightedness or presbyopia). The more one ages, the more subsequent problems become more serious.Difficulty in distinguishing certain colours:

Colours, such as blue, green, pink and violet, become difficult to identify. All pastel shades merge into a uniform halo. Mixtures of dark colours and pale colours are scarcely perceptible.

Implications in marketing to mature consumers:

To overcome these problems, contrast must be used in visual items of communication destined for the over 50s. This ranges from the choice of colours and materials for an architectural interior to the colour codes for packaging.

In TV advertising spots, advertising posters and direct marketing mailings, foregrounds and backgrounds must be sufficiently contrasted and the use of red against blue avoided in order to prevent a monochrome effect on the part of the viewer. On packaging, reflective and shiny surfaces should be avoided.

Difficulty in adapting to sudden changes is also a big issue. Moving suddenly from darkness to light, and vice versa, or from one colour to another destabilises the vision. It then takes some time for the eye to readjust to seeing clearly again. Changing images incessantly runs the risk of causing visual chaos.

Practical implications for marketing

Reject completely in TV commercials the MTV clip video style of 15 shots in 5 seconds.

Go for longer shots, a more linear approach and long formats (such as for example ‘TV infomercials’ lasting 1 minute screened during day-time schedules). It will be hard to adopt these common sense principles because the designers and producers of advertising films are strongly influenced by style of the big film-makers and the video clip culture. They find it hard to resist the ultra rapid style of a Goude or a de Mondino.

Loss in close up vision

It becomes more and more difficult for the eye to see things that are close. An adolescent sees an object at 10 cm; a person of 70 sees it at 1 metre. It is estimated that only 15% of people over 75 have 10 by 10 vision. After 50, the accommodation is insufficient to read fine print at less than 30-35 cm from the eye.

Presbyopia arises from the change in the accommodation faculty of the crystalline lens. The eye refuses to focus its lens on close letters or objects. Spectacles become essential, then they too become insufficient. One then turns to the magnifying glass that one sees beside the telephone book or the TV guide in old people’s houses.

Practical implications for marketing

Use a type body size larger than normal. 10 point is the minimum, with something between 12 and 14 point the ideal.

In addition, some typographic fonts are more difficult to read than others. Try to avoid fonts that are too complex or unusual and choose styles such as Times, Garamond or Century, with good inter-linear spacing for legibility.