Baby Boomers - a Market Mark

We baby boomers have targets on our backs. Particularly if our wallets are in our back pockets. It's our wallets being targeted, wherever we may keep them. Our parents were "the greatest generation." We're the greatest demographic. We are marked as a market, a moving target, true, but a large one and, apparently, predictable. Or at least persuasible - so the marketers think. Believe. Hope. Bank on.

Gang, listen up. We learned critical thinking in the 1960's, when "question authority" was our categorical imperative. Our groupthink mantra was individuality. We are arguably the last generation largely educated (that is to say, in public schools) in the fine art of critical thinking. It's too bad public schools have failed so resoundingly to create a skeptical and questioning citizenry since then, creating instead generation after generation of gullible consumers. But that's a topic for another time.

Today, we're being reminded of the fine point to which our minds were honed in youth, so we can retain that edge. Then, our parents couldn't predict what authority we would question next. Why now don't we question "everyman" actors touting miracle cures or get-rich-quick schemes on infomercials? Then, we ourselves couldn't predict what we would do next. Why now can the marketers predict us so accurately?

What have we become?

We have not become our parents. Those of them still alive are nicely retired on all those years of Social Security that we paid into while we were working, and those nice investments in companies whose executives took real risks, cooked no books, and performed no perp walks. No, we're not our parents - we're worse off in some material ways. The other thing we're not is who we started out to be - those inventive creators of a better society.

It's time to get back in touch with our inner rebel. And the authority we must question today is ourselves, own recent patterns of predictable behavior. We can't erase the forensic evidence of our ways as it glows blue in the investigative lights of the market researchers. We have been slaves to crass commercialism - we, the generation that was sure the times they were a-changin', and we were to be the agents of that change.

Well, the times have changed. Some of us architected those changes, but most of us read about them in the newspaper, then stopped reading and watched them on the broadcast news or listened to the one-sided versions of the news and opinions on talk-radio. Thus eroded our critical thinking skills.

Not that we have been bad people or stupid ones. We had jobs and children, and no time for research. So we got stuck on news and opinion sources we trusted, and trusted them too well for too long. We became experts in something we were paid to know about, but we stopped digging deeply into other things. We relied upon the expertise of others, with less and less investigation of their bona fides, their agendas - or the agendas of those who paraded these experts to persuade us of one thing or another.

What am I talking about? Think: value of Enron stock in 2000. Experts on CNBC told us about it. Think: imminent danger of WMD in Iraq in 2002. Experts on CNN and AM talk news stations told us about it. Think: everybody can make quick money from real estate flipping in 2005. Experts on HGTV and DIY and Fine Living told us about it.
Their advertisers all paid for those experts on those shows on those topics so we would associate their brands with "trusted experts" and use their products and services to take the experts' recommended actions. The brokers and their happy investors, the intelligence analysts and the noble generals, the realtors and renovators and flippers - they all got their fifteen minutes.

The advertisers - they got what they paid for. They insinuated their suggestions, their relationships with trusted advisors and success stories, into our subconscious. We abdicated our responsibility to do our own research. We became intellectually lazy. We have no right to whine about the annoying claxon of advertising aimed at us now.
But this is just another one of those times that can be a-changin' if we make them change.

What can we become?

Our kids are mostly grown. We're approaching retirement if we can afford it (and many marketers are counting, literally, on us doing that), or retooling our expectations and our skills if we can't (and neither many employers nor many marketers have quite figured out yet how to turn that into an opportunity for themselves). We have at this time, then, more time-and more pragmatic necessity-to think critically again, to turn our circumstances into opportunities for ourselves before the marketers sell us their vision of what we should be.

We can get back into habit of questioning every tempting ad and every expert's endorsement. Repeat after me: Yeah? Really? Compared to what?

We can redefine our "active retirements" with commitments to community service in the communities where we have defined our lives instead of in gated 55+ Del Webb communities fabricated to indulge the fantasies they're trying to sell us. Emphasis on the "sell" and on the "indulge." We can refute the marketers' smug analysis that we are shallow, self-indulgent, media-programmed robots.

We can redefine our extended or re-invented careers with new models of employment or entrepreneurship. We can imagine and bring into existence products and services for workers whose earnings are flat (or decreasing against the cost of living) while their CEOs' salaries skyrocket. We can create for ourselves healthy, productive semi-retirements that enrich the quality of both our own lives and the communities in which we live.

We can change ourselves, and then we really can change these times.