The Age of Entitlement
According to a recent issue of The Financial Times, it was Yankelovich - the market research company - that claimed to have invented the term 'baby boomer". Generation Ageless, a book written by the research company's senior partners, explored the way today's grown-up baby boomers differ from previous generations: their refusal to grow old gracefully and, indeed, their conviction that they are not growing old at all.
They certainly have no plans to make way for anyone else. As the book says, these are people who, their entire lives, have "revelled in the attention like babies at bath-time". Generation X, those born between 1965 and 1978, can wait.
In the heat of the U.S. Presidential elections, we need to remember that the two Democratic Party Candidates vying for the Democratic ticket are both baby boomers. Barack Obama is a trailing-edge boomer while Hillary Clinton is a leading-edge one. Bill and Hillary Clinton were, in fact, the White House's first baby-boomer couple. As the oldest of the baby boomers enter their sixties, their values, disputes and, above all, sheer numbers are still with us. The Clintons represent much of what the baby boomers stood for, and still stand for.
Former broadcaster Tom Brokaw's book - Boom! Voices of the Sixties - Personal Reflections on the 60s and Today - looks at baby boomers then and now reminds us what a time it was. The 1960s have led to today's advances for black Americans and for women. The current showdown between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama would have been unthinkable without the 1960s. Women now account for half or more of the students in American medical and law schools.
Although we're not Americans, the 1960's touched us all. Companies everywhere in the world now need to know what and how to sell to baby boomers. The Financial Times suggested that the answer to this is:
home offices and multi-generational cruises (for the ‘sandwiched’ boomers); easy-grip cooking utensils, higher chairs in shoe shops and cars with bigger dashboard displays. I've also blogged about fashionable hearing aids and 'tall' books. Baby boomers are getting older, whatever we think - just don't remind us!
