Marketers are often guilty of a tendency to “segment everything into little boxes”, but consumers rarely fit neatly into their assigned roles and it can be easy to miss the subtle changes that are taking place across demographics.
“While we are talking about the changing face of Asian consumers, we can tell you that cohorts of people don’t magically and suddenly transform themselves,” according to Anvaya Sharma, director of Ipsos in Singapore.
“There are gradual changes that come across,” she told the recent Ipsos PEEL: Changing Face of the Asian Consumer event. (For more, read WARC’s report: Gen Z, seniors and the affluent: Three Asian consumer segments to watch.)
Marketers need to keep on top of these to ensure their marketing strategies are working but it’s about more than that: “The deeper the understanding that we get, the more foolproof we will make the future strategies for brands,” she stated.
While Gen Z may be the “generation of disruptors”, Sharma looked to the other end of the age spectrum, where seniors, she argued, “have the potential to bring about the widest scale of disruption”.
It’s a segment that “offers exciting opportunities for marketers” in many of Asia’s ageing societies, she noted: last year, for example, the number of Singaporeans aged 65 and over matched that of citizens aged 15 and below for the first time in the country’s history.
“We hear a lot of our clients talking about how they want to tailor travel, e-commerce or even packaging in food services to be senior-specific,” said Sharma.
And companies can do better to cater to the silver segment, especially in digital where there are practical challenges in user experience for the elderly, including small, difficult-to-read font on websites, apps with too much clutter and confusing checkout processes on shopping sites.
“The world of seniors is one where they finally have time to be themselves,” Sharma added.
“They finally are getting a little bit more self-centred, they are free from responsibilities and they can literally do what their heart desires – and they have the disposable income to actually see it through. “But they still continue to look for a lot of purpose in their lives.”
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This article first appeared in www.warc.com
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