In deference to short attention spans, the report was brief and a fairly entertaining read, spending more space talking about some of China’s fun urban oldies and less pontificating.
The underlying message is clear, though. We as marketers in China have spent a lot of time and effort chasing after the under-30 age group, believing them to be a lucrative market and a reference market for other groups.
The underlying message is clear, though. We as marketers in China have spent a lot of time and effort chasing after the under-30 age group, believing them to be a lucrative market and a reference market for other groups.
Not long after I scanned the Ogilvy report, I picked up the copy of Tim Manners’ book Relevance: making stuff that matters that had been waiting patiently on my shelf for me to notice it. Manners starts his book with a rocket aimed right at one of marketing’s sacred cows: demographics.
“Demographics are dead”, Manners writes. “You can’t get from good to great by marketing solely on the basis of consumer age, gender, or ethnicity. Relevant brands take on and solve problems that transcend traditional demographic boundaries.”
There are two schools of thought about marketing in China. The ‘exceptionalists’ believe that China is such a unique place that there is little or nothing of value to be learned from overseas experts, academics or practitioners about the marketing craft that is applicable here. Only practices that are home-grown and developed with long local experience and a deep understanding of the Chinese culture can ever hope to succeed.
The ‘integrationists’ hold that China is basically like any other market, just not quite as developed. China is much like the US was 10, 20, or 30 years ago.
The exceptionalists tend to make up the majority of people in our business in China. They would suggest that, while Manners’ approach is great for the US, in China, where we are just getting beyond clients thinking of consumers as one great big undifferentiated mass, making demographic distinctions still has relevance.
I have been known to speak with passion in support of the exceptionalist argument, especially when I find myself in the company of executives who know little of how marketing works in China. But after I read the first section of Relevance, reread the Ogilvy report and thought about my own experience, I realised that Manners’ point applies in China: a focus on demographics in marketing in China is as misguided here as it is elsewhere. The Ogilvy report hints that the perception that China’s senior citizens exist as a separate market because of their shared vintage is a falsehood. Older people are increasingly integrated into market niches that are defined less by age than by lifestyle, interests, values and world view. Psychographics, in other words, trumps demographics. Even in China.
This is not to say that there aren’t some businesses that could get away with targeting China’s grey dragons and do alright by it. The health and pharmaceuticals industry springs to mind.
But as China’s senior citizens are staying healthier longer, have more disposable income, and are less constrained by restrictive social expectations, they are starting to blend into other parts of the population. As China’s post-revolutionary generation joins the ranks of the aged, distinctions based on age will fade even faster.
The message for us as marketers is clear: as China’s population ages, the opportunity is not so much in celebrating age, but in affirming the desire of the aging to stay young in heart, mind and soul.
David Wolf, CEO, Wolf Group Asia
wolfgroupasia@mac.com
