Smaller Retailers Have Value: Bigger is No Longer Better for Boomers

Marketing Trends Newsletter

June 28, 2010

510-329-8155

Sound, affordable marketing advice that saves you money.

Greetings!

I found some surprising twists to 21st Century marketing trends recently: Boomers professing a preference for smaller retailers, and Millennials exhibiting strangly normal aspirations. Find out more below.

Thank you for your business, and for making 2011 one of growth and success for GrowthFocus!

Retailers find offering less choice actually has consumer value.

When my wife first came to the U.S. from Ukraine, one of the first purchases

I am still 25, aside from some creaky knees!

she made was a curling iron at a local pharmacy. She was stunned by the challenge of choosing among ten different brands for this basic consumer item, and was not pleased that the store made her do all the work.

From my native American perspective, consumer choice is good, but I saw her point: The store could have cut the options to five, say, and still have presented a sufficient range to satisfy most customers.

Today, retailers are starting to reaccept that responsibility in the face of demands from older generations (which surprisingly now includes Baby Boomers), who apparently don't want to wrestle with huge stores and extensive selections anymore.

See my blog post for more, but older consumers seem to be voting with their dollars in support of this, as it meets their needs for less physically demanding spaces that don't require lots of walking.

This just in! Millennials are human, just like us.

When you switch from style to values, they share all the basic aspirations as most generations.

In all the hoopla about how the youngest adult generation is hooked up and

Young Men Sporting Mature Values

tech savvy, it can be forgotten that much of their behavior is only different in style from previous generations. Indeed, when you focus on values rather than style, these young adults report a set of values that makes them suspiciously "normal":

Recent research by Frank N. Magid Associates (summarized here) showed four things consistently ranked in the top five life goals for Gen Yers, Xers and Boomers:

Having a good relationship with my family

Having excellent physical/mental health

Having a happy marriage

Having close friends

For more perspective, check this About.com article out. The lesson here for marketers is that we have to adapt our creative when talking to Millennials, but our core value messages may have more cross-generational impact than we give them credit for. It's worth testing as a hypothesis, anyway!

Small Businesses and DIY Marketing.

When does it make sense to keep Marketing in-house?

Small businesses hate to spend money without an immediate return. That limits their ability to invest in marketing, because payoffs on that investment are often months away, because it takes time to build an audience. Here are some questions I always ask when examining this Big Hurdle with clients:

What is an hour of your time worth?
What is your skill set? To what should you be dedicating your hours to maximize ROI?
What is the value of one extra customer (lifetime value if possible)?

Use those numbers to examine the cost of hiring outside help to run your marketing for you. I have a client who has deep marketing experience, but recognizes that as a CEO he cannot do everything, and has to delegate tasks to people with lower hourly rates than his. Hence our relationship.