Age is just a number

Published on: August 21, 2022

My cousin Swati celebrated her 42nd birthday last week. In addition to being a marketing wiz, she is a hoarder when it comes to Barbie dolls. Why, you ask? Well, her 3-year-old loves them, and Swati makes a doting mother. Swati and her husband had their daughter 8 years into their marriage. Though a common trend now, this continues to amaze their relatives and marketers in equal measure. More so for marketers, this is slowly but surely becoming a pattern often spotted. Swati represents a growing community of women that are breaking stereotypes and making brands realise the need for age-agnostic market segmentation.

In a society that is deeply rooted in chronology based stereotypes, it can be quite tempting for marketers to segment women on this metric alone. Truth be told, we have realized now that women often face similar challenges and experiences throughout their lives, just not at the same age. This is why clichés like “50 is the new 40” and “40 is the new 30,” make more sense – because there is substance behind them. With women striving for higher education and coveted jobs, marriage and household responsibilities now occur later in life. In many countries, the average age at a first birth is close to 30.  So naturally, spending decisions made by the modern woman will be driven primarily by her life stage and not constrained by her age alone. 

We are well into the age of no age. The conventional advertising idea that associated age with life stage has become redundant now. Today, a 30-year-old woman could just be single and working on her start-up plans and a 40-year-old may have recently given birth to a baby. Both these women are in their own life stages, which are not bound by their peers of the same age. For the next two decades, their purchasing needs will be driven by their respective life stages, which could be significantly different from that of their classmates. As such, for a significant number of product categories, life stage is a more accurate gauge of a person’s needs and shopping patterns than the number of revolutions a woman has made around the sun.

So, if you were looking for someone to validate that age is indeed merely a number, consider it done. Advertisers, take note.

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