OK Boomer Jumps the Shark as the Boomer Economy Rides the Wave

Authors: Marc Matthews and Barry Robertson

Grownups hijack cute Generation Z meme 

Everyone roots for young entrepreneurs. But the sad reality is that many – maybe most – see their Big Ideas co-opted by interlopers.

So it is with OK Boomer, the Generation Z meme of the month. After teenagers launched this cute little pouty put down, adult arrivistes quickly hijacked it as a platform for personal agendas, pontification and PR. Googling the term yielded over 12 million news site hits in the first two weeks of November, 2019 as media and marketing players piled on.

Mercifully, the end is near: thanks to cringe-worthy over use, OK Boomer has jumped the shark.

It will soon join Dude, You’re Getting a Dell and hanging chads in the nostalgia zone.

Cecilia D’Anastasio at gaming review site Kotaku, nailed it: Peak ‘OK Boomer’ Reached. Steel yourself and click her link to anime star Naruto’s voice actor screeching out the meme.

You’ll be over it in no time.

Gen Z is Adland's fig leaf fix for Millennial missteps and Boomer bungling

Although the OK Boomer barb is fading, for the next dozen years or so Gen Z will remain the go-to grabber for news outlets, pollsters, ad agencies and brands recycling claims that Millennials Zers will disrupt/upend/overturn everything, etc., etc., etc.

Z-boosting reflects Madison Avenue's eagerness to divert attention from past predictions, now revealed as mistakes and missteps, because Millennials are selling out to normalcy.

Crossing the 30th birthday frontier, they adopt conventional lifestyles, marry, have children, buy homes in the burbs and opt for family-friendly vehicles.

In short, they become like their Boomer parents who, despite buying half of everything sold in America, are deemed too old to adapt and too destructive to brand image to openly target.

So Adland's new challenge is to change the generational conversation and find ways to sell the importance of 13-year-olds whose buying power derives mainly from taking out the garbage and walking the dog.

Generational revisionism: ample precedent.

Except for Baby Boomers, memorialized as born 1946-1964, generational labels and birth year ranges skittered around for decades as, inevitably, unexpected events forced constant revisions. Mostly, these gyrations came at the expense of Gen X.

Having endured such earlier labels as the Grunge, MTV, Latchkey and Slacker generation, Xers also had to settle for being squeezed between Boomers and Millennials in the race for marketer attention.

Although some experts accorded them 17 or even 20 birth years (1965-1981, Strauss and Howe); 1965-1984, The Harvard Center), in other scenarios they barely transitioned from training wheels to a Stingray before hitting their sell-by date. Both have updated since, but The New York Times originally allowed them only 10 birth years (1965-1974) and Pew offered 12 (1965-1976).

With revisionist history as a guide, trend-makers began to dislodge Millennials from their perch atop the pecking order: Job One was to dethrone them as America’s largest generation.

Easy peasy.

Although in 2015, the U.S. Census Bureau defined Millennials as people born 1982-2000, The Pew Research Center stripped their bragging rights in 2018 by switching to born 1981-1996.

Some 16 million Zers arrived in the 18-49 demo overnight and, under the radar, Boomers bounced back as America's largest generation.

Gen Z zooms, Millennials mainstream, but Boomers buy, big time

Ignored in the campaign to promote Gen Z and slide Millennials off the front page, is the far greater importance of older demographics to brand profit.

The American 50+ space is the world’s 3rd largest economy after the U.S. and China.

Dominated by Boomers and older Gen Xers, consumers over 50 account for 52% of U.S. household expenditures, about three times the 18-34 share (18%).

Similar spending patterns hold true across key industries upon which the nation's economic heath depends. Buyers aged 55+ are responsible for 63% of home improvement, remodeling and maintenance spending (Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies) and 56% of US household expenditures on new vehicles comes from consumers 50 and older (Bureau of Labor Statistics).

Add Federal Reserve data to the mix and we're talking real money: households headed by people 50+ own 80% of America's personal wealth.

Boomers already know they are OK

Boomers are comfortable in their own skin. They have a strong sense of cohesion; they know and like who they are and, so to speak, they know when their story begins. This allows them, more than subsequent generations, to construct a narrative regarding the arc of their lives.

A 2015 Pew survey found 79% of Boomers correctly identified their generational age range: only 40% of Millennials correctly self-identified, as did over half (58%) of Gen X.

However in a testament to Boomer cachet, 15% of Xers claimed to belong to this hip in-crowd.

An even greater percentage (34%) of the Silent Generation described themselves as Boomers, tracking with real-world socio-cultural overlap. Many iconic “Boomers” were actually born in the late Silent era, including all The Monkees, Jimi Hendrix, Diana Ross, Jerry (The Grateful Dead) Garcia and Peter (Easy Rider) Fonda.

Boomer / neXt research in the 50+ arena confirms that to be a Boomer is to Belong, to be part of something bigger than oneself.

Our 2017 Brand Courtship? Study asked 500 Americans aged 50-71 what Baby Boomer means to them; we found they bond over when they were born/their shared age group, the wars and music that punctuated their youth and a sense of optimism and confidence.

These shared connections balance perfectly with individual aspirations for success as parents, workers, worshippers and Americans: study participants consistently referenced hard work, responsibility and playing by the rules as Boomer traits – values that Pew, Gallup and others say younger groups do not as strongly associate with their own generations.

But perhaps the most important attribute that Boomers assign themselves is wisdom: 94% feel that they have grown wiser as they grew older. It is a finding with great significance for marketers, advertisers and – most of all – for the brands they represent.

The brand/Boomer disconnect

Awash in Big Data, metrics, surveys and statistics, brand decision makers are well-aware of the Boomers’ incredible purchasing power, but they flounder when it comes to inner mind decision-making dynamics in the 50+ space. It’s understandable.

The average agency creative staffer is 28; half of all ad/marketing/PR professionals are gone by age 39; only 5-10% are 50-plus.

While undeniably talented, young marketers have little resonance with the socio-cultural imprinting of people who have transitioned through life stages that they have yet to encounter personally.

Even so-called age-agnostic advertising falls short of optimum engagement because there is no such thing as age-agnostic perception.

Products and brands do not exist in a vacuum, nor are they defined by the latest update, iteration or marketing campaign. In Boomer World, brands operate on a constantly evolving continuum that includes not only their own historical relationships with consumers but also the category context, past and present.

And, consumers over 50 have been advertised to all their lives: they are older and wiser.

Without a genuine understanding of these hidden motivators, advertising outcomes risk becoming stereotypes at best, caricatures at worst.

According AARP research, 83% over 50 feel advertisers "make mistakes when trying to appeal to their age group." And our own Brand Courtship study, referenced above, found consumers use highly negative terms to describe how they see themselves depicted in advertising directed to them.

About Boomer / neXt: understanding generational imprinting

Unfortunately, even disruptives willing to risk engagement beyond the 18-49 demographic face a powerful barrier. Older consumers cannot fully articulate their brand perceptions; after decades of socio-cultural imprinting, they think and communicate in a subtle silent language, the deeply embedded sources and syntax of which they scarcely remember. 

Boomer / neXt conducts creative seminars that teach managers to learn and leverage this hidden language and regenerate their brands in the 50+ space, the world's 3rd largest economy.