Every Monday, we recap the mature marketing content that most engaged during the previous week.
This week, Brand Packaging explains the role that color plays in making or breaking your brand and the steps that you can take in order to make sure you are choosing the right colors for your audience.
Also, the Las Vegas Review-Journal published an article detailing the newest trend in retirement for Baby Boomers: not retiring. Read on to learn why many are making the decision to forgo traditional retirement, and how senior industry marketers should adapt to this trend.
MOST CLICKED: The Importance of Color in Your Branding
Color plays a vital role in the branding for any company, but a new article published by Brand Packaging explains how color could actually make or break your brand depending on how properly it is utilized.
In regards to color, what one person experiences when they look at a certain color isn’t always what another person experiences when they look at the same color. Perception of color, and the emotions that accompany these perceptions, vary by region, culture, gender — and yes — age.
According to the National Eye Institute, the risk of cataracts increases each decade after the 40th birthday, and by age 80, 70 percent of white Americans have a cataract, compared to 53 percent of African Americans and 61 percent of Hispanic Americans.
Because cataracts cause older adults to see color differently, for example blues can be hard to distinguish from greens and purples, it is important for marketing professionals in the senior living industry to be especially careful when choosing colors for their brands.
Bright colors are recommended in order to avoid any confusion from the target audience, but the challenges for color selection don’t stop there.
Every color comes with its own set of emotional connotations. For example, orange, yellow and brown are sometimes connected with being cheap or inexpensive, although yellow also is known to create perceptions of fun and modernity.
On the other hand, blue is known to symbolize feelings of confidence, success and reliability. It’s no wonder so many companies within the senior living industry rely on blue as part of their branding.
Source: www.pinterest.com
Even after accounting for factors such as age and emotional perceptions, marketers still must take gender into account.
Men are less concerned with different shades of colors, while even the slightest changes in hue can evoke a different reaction from women. Why should you care about gender if you are marketing to older adults? Statistically speaking, we know that there are more older women than older men, and that caregivers are typically women.
This adds yet another degree of difficulty to selecting such a vital element of your branding because, although women may be in the majority in the senior demographic, it would be unwise to not take the color preference of men into consideration during the branding process.
For all marketers, not just those in the senior living industry, the best course of action is to not only do extensive research on different color meanings and perceptions but to also test them out before deciding whether they evoke the emotions that you want from your brand.
Conducting brand perception surveys and focus groups with your target audience will be very helpful in determining the colors best suited for your brand.
Click here to read more about color and branding.
RELATED: Advice about color in design is just one of the tips shared by our Creative Services team in this free white paper: 15 Top Design Tips for the Mature Consumer.
MOST SHARED: “Never” is when Many Baby Boomers Plan to Retire
It has been said that Baby Boomers are changing the face of retirement — in fact, some Boomers are electing not to retire at all according to an article published in the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
Deb Workman, a 54-year-old recovery nurse explained it best,
“I have a desire to help people that my mother instilled in me. I enjoy golf and cruises, but that gets boring if you want to contribute to make a better society.”
For many Boomers, the decision to not retire is related to a desire to continue working and contributing in their daily lives rather more than it is related to the cost of retirement.
While some industries have made it known that employees are no longer needed after their 65th birthday, many people feel that this is the age where they have the most to contribute to the workforce given the decades of prior knowledge and experience they have accrued.
Baby Boomers are expecting to live longer and have a desire to remain working as long as they can. Many Boomers aren’t tempted by the life of golf and cruises just yet, and it’s becoming more apparent that some of them never will be, as Creating Results President Todd Harff wrote in this article for 50+ Housing Magazine.
For professionals in the senior living industry, this will have to be taken to account, considering that Baby Boomers now make up the majority of your target market.
Just because they want to continue working doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t interested in moving to a CCRC. Your marketing should emphasize how they can focus more on their careers and less on things like home maintenance. Talk more about the opportunities for encore careers, philanthropy and lifelong learning at world-renowned universities because this is what matters to a significant portion of Baby Boomers.
Many of these future residents want a life in which they can continue to have a sense of purpose while not having to worry about the negative aspects of home ownership, and can take the occasional cruise or golfing trip.