I was recently interviewed by The Globe and Mail in an article published on January 28 about marketing retirement products and services to boomers. I mentioned that it’s very challenging to get the tone right when marketing to boomers, not just for retirement products and services, but for consumer brands as well .

But there are a few examples of brands that have got it right. The first that comes to mind is Kimberly-Clark’s seven-month-old “Underawareness” ad campaign for its Depend undergarments. According to The New York Times, “Underawareness” is a portmanteau of “underwear” and “awareness.” Even though it is aimed at consumers under 50 because nearly half of those who experience some form of urinary incontinence are under 50, it’s a clever way to talk to boomers as well. There is nothing more unglamorous than incontinence – yet, a lot of senior citizens depend on Depend diapers to protect themselves on a daily basis.

According to the brand, the goal of the campaign is to reduce the stigma of the products by showing that bladder incontinence is common and affects younger people more than many people realize. It also highlights that the products look more like underwear than resembling bulky diapers decades ago. The voice-over in the commercial said, “It’s time to bring it out in the open – it’s time to drop your pants for Underawareness. A cause to support the over 65 million people who may need Depend underwear. Show them they’re not alone, and show off a pair of Depend, because wearing a different kind of underwear is no big deal.” Instead of using elderly models, print ads and billboards in the campaign feature attractive models and the brand wanted to show the product outside of its packaging to show that even diaper-underwear could look fashionable!

According to market research firm Euromonitor International, the incontinence underwear category in the U.S. has grown steadily from $1.19 billion in 2008 to $1.55 billion in 2013 – an increase of 30 percent due to an aging population. What I like about this marketing campaign is that Kimberly-Clark understands that by addressing the stigma of incontinence products, the brand could substantially grow for both the boomer and seniors markets as well as the younger-than-50 market suffering from incontinence. It is a bold and gutsy way to embark on a marketing campaign addressing the normality of incontinence with a more fashionable underwear look than the traditional ugly and bulky diapers. Even though the ad campaign wasn’t supposedly aimed at us boomers, how could you not look at these commercials and ads and say, “I can wear that with dignity when the time comes?”

In my last blog post, I commented on Celine and YSL using more mature, authentic women as their faces, namely Joan Didion and Joni Mitchell respectively. But I think it is Prada Menswear that has gone one step further by making Prada a fashion brand for both boomers and millennials. All right, they haven’t gone all the way out to use a boomer face yet, but Prada’s Spring 2015 menswear campaign features the 45-year-old Ethan Hawke as one of its dapper models. Hawke may not fit the boomer demographic in his actual age yet, but his “Before Midnight” and, more recently, “Boyhood” fame clearly made him a boomer father by association.

The other three faces for this campaign are much younger millennial actors – the 27-year-old lead actor of Oscar-nominated movie Whiplash, Miles Teller; the 24-year-old British actor in Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken, Jack O’Connell; and  the 20-year-old male lead of the movie Divergent, Ansel Elgort. Even though Hawke is not even 50, he looks like a father to the other three younger kids in the same ad campaign. This, in itself, should appeal to boomer men without alienating their younger counterparts.

In fact, fashion brands seem to be fascinated with age and experience this season. Apart from Celine and YSL, Dolce & Gabbana – usually an exceptionally youthful brand – featured a cluster of charming grandmothers gossip with the brand’s embellished leather bags and golden crowns gleaming against their widows’ weeds in the fashion ad. What a brilliant way to demonstrate the spirit of D&G’s Sicilian heritage!

Continuing with the salute to more mature women, Givenchy’s face this season is 47-year-old Julia Roberts while Burberry’s campaign starred iconic supermodel Naomi Campbell cuddling the 24-year-old Jourdan Dunn (somehow giving a slight hint of a mentor-mentee relationship).

Mature men and women inspire a lot of younger people, and it just appears that marketers are slowly and gradually beginning to get it!

Photo Credit: Hollywood.com

I was recently interviewed by Canadian Press (CP) about two marketing campaigns for leading international luxury brands featuring older models – Joni Mitchell for Yves Saint Laurent and Joan Didion for Celine. The CP article subsequently got picked up by The Vancouver Sun, The Province, The Windsor Star, Brandon Sun, Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal, Ottawa Citizen, Leader-Post, The Star Phoenix, The Huffington Post Canada, Canada.com, and the websites of Global TV News and CTV News.

The excitement about the 71-year-old Mitchell and 80-year-old Didion emerging as fashion’s newest faces generated a lot of buzz and attention in the media, both online and traditional. When the CP reporter asked me whether this was a marketing gimmick just to be different or whether the two luxury brands were trying to appeal to boomer consumers, I shared with her my thoughts as follows.

Using mature women as models for fashion brands is not entirely new. In my blog post entitled Model Boomers on February 17, 2009, I’ve already said that the fashion industry is finally getting it – you really need boomer models to appeal to boomer consumers! At that time six years ago, the 50-year-old Madonna was donning the ads for Louis Vuitton; 52-year-old Jerry Hall was the new face of Chanel; 50-year-old Twiggy was the model for Marks & Spencer; Ines de la Fresange, a former Lagerfeld muse, walked the Paris haute couture runways at 51; and Lauren Hutton becoming J. Crew’s 2009 cover girl. This trend has progressively been continuing throughout the years.  What’s new now with Mitchell and Didion is that they were not even style or fashion icons when they were younger. Canadian Joni Mitchell (who now lives in California) is a musical icon while Joan Didion is an American literary legend who has inspired so many journalists and writers. The current marketing strategy is not just focusing on external beauty, but a celebration of individuality and inherent beauty. It’s another way of saying: Beauty is not just skin deep – it’s ageless!

So are YSL and Celine trying to appeal to boomer consumers or are these two campaigns using older women more like marketing gimmicks? As luxury brands, of course, they are trying to be different and edgy. The industry chat and word-of-mouth publicity alone have been generating a lot of media and consumer buzz and that’s what advertising is all about! But I also think that marketers are following the money. In Canada alone, boomers comprise 29 percent of the national population and control more than 70 percent of Canadian wealth and close to 60 percent of consumer spending. Discerning boomer women can definitely afford luxury brands and they are not attracted by young, bone-thin and waif-like fashion models. They want to see authentic, mature women role models exuberating confidence, wisdom and vibrancy in fashion advertising.

I would also hope that these luxury-brand marketers are also, at the same time, trying to appeal to younger intelligent women who are inspired by the two musical and literary icons. Maybe by appealing to more mature consumers, YSL and Celine are also trying  to develop new markets among brainier, younger women who are not necessarily yearning to look like the skinny fashion models on the runway.

Having said that, impressive marketing campaigns are useless if they don’t have products that appeal to their target consumers. I took a quick look on the YSL and Celine websites and I have to say that there are very few items on either one that would appeal to me! It’s always a very fine line marketing to boomers – you do not want to offer dowdy-looking apparel to mature women consumers who are still stylish and fashion- conscious. At the same time, you also want to stay away from designing and making clothing that would just appeal to these women’s daughters and granddaughters who might not be able to afford these luxury brands anyway.

I salute older women who continue to pay attention to fashion and be individualistic in their own styles. That’s why I always like the fashion blog http://advancedstyle.blogspot.com (as pointed out by Professor Ben Barry of Ryerson University in the CP article as well) which features stylish, mature women in the streets of New York City. It is truly a brave and refreshing initiative which should be replicated here in Canada as well.