In this Speak PR episode, Jim James argues that the rapidly aging global population—now containing more 55‑year‑olds than 5‑year‑olds—represents a massive, under‑served market. He begins with a personal anecdote from a camping trip in Aberystwyth, where he helped a 70‑year‑old neighbour set up a Huawei Wi‑Fi router, illustrating the knowledge gap many seniors face. James cites demographic data showing that roughly 75 % of wealth in the UK and US is held by people over 65, especially women, yet only about 5 % of advertising targets the 50+ segment. He explains that older consumers are digitally active (68 % shop online monthly) but have distinct preferences: they value simplicity, trust, functional messaging, and robust support over aspirational or aggressive marketing. The episode offers concrete tactics—using large‑button devices, clear instructions, audio‑readers like Talkify and NaturalReaders, larger screens, Doro phones, and hearing‑aid‑compatible audio—to make products accessible. James stresses the importance of age‑appropriate imagery, showing older adults as vibrant and relatable, and highlights community platforms such as SilverSurfers.com for outreach. He then maps these insights onto his Speak PR framework (Storify, Personalization, Engagement, Amplification, Know), showing how each step can be tailored for senior audiences. The talk concludes with a call to action for marketers to shift focus toward this cash‑rich, health‑conscious demographic, leveraging the presented strategies to unlock new business potential.
Chapters
Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James, and I like to unlock the potential in everybody's business by using public relations, because public relations tools and activities can be free to use and global and instant. Now, not everybody is trying to market to the world, but most of us should be thinking about marketing to older people. And on this episode, I'm going to talk about what I learned from being on a camping trip and helping my neighbors in their camper van to buy a wireless router. And thinking for anyone out there that is marketing their goods and services to the older generation about some key tips and some key websites that we can all use to make sure we get our news and views to the older generation, the Silver Surfers. Parents who are actually the wealthiest group in the world. Now, 75% of all UK and American wealth, and I think this probably translates into pretty much most of the world now in the advanced and developing world, is owned by those over 65, and most of those are actually women. So you could say that old women own most of the American and the UK wealth. And it was a lady next door to me at the campsite in Aberystwyth on the west coast of Wales who took a great interest in our ability to get Wi-Fi when we were by the seaside. We got chatting because her husband said that he wasn't really that tech savvy, but his wife, who was a silver-haired lady, with some very nice thick-rimmed glasses. She was the lady to talk to because all they could do was to get one channel of the BBC, and only if they turned their antennae in a certain direction. And they were amazed that in our camper van, we had everybody on iPads and phones surfing the web with Netflix and Apple TV and email. So I shared with her through my Amazon account, the Huawei router that I'd bought with a Vodafone data-only card, the combination being just £130 for that and a £20 a month subscription fee, and a pointing remote antenna which I bought which has a long cable and can extend the range of the Wi-Fi router. And this lady in her 70s, I imagine, was mesmerized, and she said, I want to know how to do that. She said, you know, of course, you know, no one shows us. No one shows us how to do these things. And it just occurred to me as she was saying that, that it's true that as print publications have started to die a death, The old route where people would be reading newspapers are not available, but also no one's really writing tech magazines for the over 50s and over 60s, which is strange really if you think about it, because in countries like, for example, Italy, there'll be over a million people living over the age of 90 by the age of 2026. Okay, that's a large number of people over the age of 90, and In Italy, it's a predominantly female group. In Germany, it's the same demographic, and across many parts of Asia, as we've seen in Japan, for example, an aging population and largely female surviving and outlasting the men. But what we're seeing is that most businesses are not really addressing the needs of older people. And the irony of it being, of course, that my neighbor in the campsite wasn't able to get online to even find out about how to get online. And so she was in a vacuum. And looking around me, she wasn't the only person in that campsite who actually could only get one channel, even though they really wanted to surf the internet. They could only get one satellite channel. There's a huge opportunity that companies are missing, and it's not least because some of the traditional channels of publications are, A, not available, and even those ones that are, are not addressing this large and growing contingent that is all around us. And it really almost doesn't matter what business or industry we're in, but the Silver Surfer generation are the wealthiest group now in our societies, but also they are healthier and more active than ever before. So the 75-year-olds of today are as physically active as the 55-65-year-olds were 15-20 years ago. And certainly people in their 70s, 60s and 70s, like to think of themselves as being almost a decade younger than they actually are. So this idea that we are needing to think about marketing to older people is often colored by a sense of what our grandparents were like. I'm in my 50s, but actually people in their 70s now don't live and breathe and work or consume in the way that my grandparents did. My grandparents came out of the Second World War and were all into conservation. They used to give us orange juices in an orange juice drink in a wine glass, for example, on a Sunday morning for breakfast. Whereas now, of course, pensioners would think nothing of going to Florida. So the 70-year-olds in the 2020s were the teenagers at the time of the Beatles and of the launch, for example, of the oral contraceptives. They have a totally different generation from the people 10 years earlier than them. Our marketing messages and visual identity and the tools that we use need to reflect that. Like the lady next door to me, she was part of a group which we might call in the UK the Silver Surfers. And in the UK, there's actually a website called silversurfers.com, and they have over 1 million subscribers and members. And they call themselves the largest and fastest growing online community for the over 50s. Now remember that Madonna is now 60, so for those of us that grew up listening to the Material Girl singing, she's now eligible pretty much for a bus pass in the UK. But if you see them still performing, or even people like Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones— so if we're looking at marketing to older people we need to start thinking about who's doing the marketing and the perception of those older people. Now, too often people in marketing are in their 20s and 30s, especially those people who are employed to do digital marketing. They may be in their early to mid-20s. There's a massive age gap between the people often undertaking the PR and marketing and the audience that they're appealing to. So we should think then about what is sometimes called old advertising, as in like advertising to old people. And if we look around us, often it's kind of a fairly sort of disastrous-looking collection of bad mortgages, the adverts about life insurance and how long will your pension last, Erectile dysfunction pills and bathtubs that won't kill you and elevators to go inside your home and sliding staircases. But actually, there's a large number of people who are perfectly healthy and happy and living well into their 80s and 90s, both economically and physically active. According to the Havas Group, the media group, only 5% of US advertising is aimed at people over 50. Can you imagine that? So even though in 2020 the world has more 55-year-olds than 5-year-olds, only 5% of advertising is aimed at these people. So a bit like my neighbour at the campsite in Aberystwyth, she had no problem at all. In fact, she went online, took pictures of my Amazon purchases and went online and proceeded to purchase that evening using her 4G data, um, £200 worth of technology, which she would have delivered to her home when she arrived back. So this is a group of people who are cash-rich by and large, and who have an appetite for consuming things, but they do have some special requirements. But why do we continue to advertise and promote to the young? One, one research by the Forrester Group suggested that 55% of those aged 31 and below say that they enjoy trying new brands and products. But once people get to the 64 to 75 years old, only 31% enjoy trying new things. In other words, Adoption of new products and new services declines as people get older, which makes sense. We become more conservative. But that doesn't mean that this group don't still have demands. My experience of dealing with older people, like helping this lady next door on the campsite, or even my parents, is that actually they're very keen. But what they are is more reticent, and they need a slightly different and less aggressive kind of marketing. They're not aspirational, they're functional. Now, what we're finding as well in this Havas report called the Meaningful Brand Study of 2018, it shows that 68% of the over-55s have bought something online every month. In other words, this generation of people over 55 have become digital shoppers. Now, there are some solutions I've shared earlier on. For example, one is called Talkify. On one's website, we can actually have text-to-audio readers. Talkify uses AI, which is fantastic, and it's an embedded app that you can have on your website. naturalreaders.com has a function where you can upload, for example, PDF documents and have it read in over 60 languages. And therefore, people that are maybe troubled with their eyesight as they get older could still have access to, for example, all the technical documentation for products and services that they've purchased. Now, image selection needs to be considered very carefully when we're marketing products, because on average, a good rule of thumb is that most people see themselves as 5 to 10 years younger than they actually are. I know at 53, I don't like to think of myself as 53. I like to think of myself as a spry 40-year-old. So no one wants to feel or look old, but we do recognize that certain things in our lives and certain categories in our lives will open up. We start to look at life insurance, for example, or hearing aids, or or friends that are getting surgeries to do with hips, for example. But what we do want to do is to make sure that in our marketing, the, the customer groups that we're looking at can connect with the person they see in their adverts. And this is happening now increasingly where we see some consumer brands, including people like Nike, connecting with older people, for example, doing extreme sports. So as we look at our own brands, can we think about who's doing the marketing? And are they marketing to their grandparents, or are they marketing, for example, to the lady next door in my campsite who's actually an adopter of technology, but what she needs is something slightly different to a TechCrunch-style website? Now going back to my my sort of display there, what I did for the lady, uh, in the campsite, and her husband didn't want to come. He said that that was his wife's department. Um, I showed her the router. I showed her the front and the back, and I showed how easy it was to put in the SIM card, and I showed her how to connect to the network using the Apple device that she had. In this case, she had an Apple phone and an Apple iPad, but her understanding was that she could only access the internet through her phone and that she couldn't access the internet through her iPad. So she hadn't understood about tethering, but also she hadn't understood how to create a network using her iPad, even though it was perfectly possible to do that. So one of the learnings when we talk to older people is the need for simplicity. How difficult is it to set up the product that we're offering? How difficult is it to communicate? It's the simplicity of, for example, the connections. I showed her how the Poynting external antennae that I had purchased, how simple it was to work And the the little screws that you have that connect this pointing external antennae to the back of my Huawei are nice and big. They're easy to access. So even if we've got arthritis, which more and more people are getting, of course, as they reach their 50s and 60s, we can still connect it. What about the trust? This lady next door hadn't. In fact, she she didn't call it Huawei. She called it Hawaii. All the time, she she hadn't thought about Hawaii yet as a brand to buy. I I said it's Huawei, not Hawaii, but she she was keen to call it Hawaii, so I let her keep that that association. But she'd never heard of Huawei, and and certainly wasn't about to buy this brand without someone like me. Demonstrated that I'd already made that purchase. So is there a way in our marketing that we can demonstrate that there are other people like them that have already made that purchase and taken that risk? And the third element I think that we have to look at is support. How difficult is it once something's been purchased to get help? And the, the user manuals, either online or offline, The access to a 24-hour helpline, it can be key with a simple phone number. Now, because this age group are not price sensitive, they're not looking— I'm not looking either at saving money on something like this. I'm thinking about functionality. I'm thinking about simplicity. I'm thinking about having to do a trust check. And I'm also thinking about if it doesn't work because I've not done this before, or none of my peers are using this kind of technology, who can I ask? And they may or may not be able to go on to a chat, for example, online. And if you think about it, many of these people can't get online in the first place. That's the irony of it right now. Bear in mind that some of the technology. Is becoming more and more available, but also older people are adopting these new kinds of technologies. So a report in the UK recently showed that 27% of all people aged 75 and above use tablets. That's pretty massive adoption. 27% of all people over the age of 75 in the UK use tablets, and I suggest That's probably similar. And in China, where I lived for 13 years, the older people were either using tablets or the phablets or the, you know, the interim size large phones like the iPhone 11 Plus. Because the eyes are not as good and the fingers are not as good, old people are adopting bigger technology with bigger screens, or they may be even adopting and buying a product like the Doro mobile phones which for about £70 have easy-to-use flip phones, slide phones, and regular phones, but they have big buttons on them and they have clear symbols. They have less functionality, but also they have assistant buttons almost like a Siri. They have ease of navigation, and what they also can do is have, for example, loudspeaker systems, and some even have hearing aid compatible audio options. I know for my dad who has hearing aids, he has to adjust the software on his phone so that the phone on and the hearing aid systems are managing to balance the audio for him. So when we think about marketing in our Speak PR methodology, we talk about Storify, Personalization, Engagement, Amplification, and Know. P for personalization. Let us all think about who we're serving. This is for our internal audiences, our staff. If we have older members of staff, are we making the messaging compatible? But are we also making the devices compatible for them to read it on? For our partners and for our customers, Are we giving them simplicity? Are we helping them to trust us? And are we offering them support where we failed in the first two items? So Patek Philippe say that we never own a watch; we simply are looking after it for the next generation. But my experience is that the next generation are actually not thinking just about buying a legacy because they're not really ready to die. Like the lady next to me in the campsite, before they go offline, they want to go online and they want to be entertained and they want to buy and they want to live life to the full. So let's think about how we can help them to do that with our effective public relations campaigns. Thank you for listening to this episode of Speak PR, and if you like this, please do rate it, do subscribe, and visit us at eastwestpr.com for this And lots of other news about how to get your company noticed. My name is Jim James. Thank you so much for listening.
