A recent article in the Washington Blade on “Bridging the Great Divide” about aging in the LGBT community got me thinking about baby boomers and “gayby boomers” and the differences in attention paid to these audiences by marketers.
Forgive my elementary assumptions here, but if there are 78 million baby boomers and 10% of them are gay (assuming the standard 10 percent figure most widely used for the LGBT percentage of the general population), then there are approximately 7.8 million “gayby boomers” in the population. In this age of sub-segments, niche marketing and micro targeting, 7.8 million people ought to be an attractive market. Then why isn’t it? Do you see many 50+ representations of LGBT people in popular culture? I don’t.
There are one or two print ads I can think of that include gray gays, but most advertising doesn’t seem to focus on this sub-segment and most public relations campaigns aimed at our community seem focused on the “more desirable” 18-34 market. I think that’s a big mistake. Many gayby boomers are similar to their straight counterparts: they need retirement advice, they have concerns about healthcare for themselves, their elderly parents and/or their children, they plan vacations and eat out at restaurants, etc. On paper, they seem like an attractive target.
While the straight community seems to have discovered baby boomers as a target market in all of these niches, gayby boomers have been mostly left in the closet.
Despite the seeming obviousness of this sub-segment as a market (and efforts by some organizations like SAGE and companies like our client RainbowVision to reach them), this audience is a great example of part of that powerful, loyal, untapped LGBT community we keep talking about.
But this is not to say that mainstream marketers are entirely to blame for avoiding this audience. I think much of the problem resides in the LGBT community. We don’t want to get old and we don’t want to admit that we’re aging. For many of us, it took so long to come out that now that we’re here we want to enjoy all the things we missed. Retirement planning is nowhere near as interesting as a party or weekend trip with friends. We don’t want to see representations of ourselves in an “unflattering light.” In that way, we’re just like our straight counterparts. But if aging can be trendy for them, why not for us?
It just takes one or two leaders to get the ball rolling. Once one company finds success in this space, others will surely flock there.
As Steve pointed out last week, sex doesn’t sell everything, and I am hoping that the newfound maturity in advertising will blossom into a newfound recognition of the many sub-segments in our community and new ways to reach them. As the Blade article pointed out, there are people working in our community to "bridge the divide" and bring us together. Some progress is being made in the LGBT community. We’re out of the closet in many generations; now it’s time that marketers figured that out too.
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