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ageless marketing: Strategies for Reaching the Hearts & Minds of the New Customer Majority David B. Wolfe with Robert E. Snyder Dearborn Trade Publishing, a Kaplan Professional Company Chicago, IL 336 pp. ISBN 0-7931-7744-3 US $25.00, Can 37.95
Keywords Ageless marketing, Anti-being experience, Being experiences, Boomers, Experiential segmentation, Left brain/right brain, Seasons of life, Value portraits
Review DOI: 10.1108/07363760510631200
ageless marketing, divided into five parts, of three chapters each, presents a compelling charge to marketers, advertisers and salespeople to look at the market in a new light. Beginning with Part I, "An era of new rules", all the way through and including Part V, "Preparing landing sites for marketing messages", readers will find new ideas and concepts mixed with classic philosophical quotations that support the new. A delightful twist in format is offering the readers an interlude in the middle of the book and then a later chapter that chronicles five generations of a family. The Erskine family logs give enhanced credibility to all of the author's "seasonal" concepts. Wolfe uses this particular family as a "microcosm of the marketplace" (p. 217). Its members range from ten months to 91 years of age.
Mr Wolfe, with Mr Snyder, insists that marketing is missing the boat without recognizing, addressing, and implementing many ideas he has brought together. For serious marketers, this business book requires thorough reading with attention to, and retention of, the many terms the author creates and uses. It comprehensively includes and builds upon these terms, the most frequently uses of which I list above as keywords. While many may argue that younger consumers pay more attention to advertising and act on it, the new consumer majority becomes larger each day and thus has the potential for greater revenues. Their sheer volume makes appropriate advertising a must.
There is often much-appreciated connectivity in the book to examples and relationships from past chapters. These serve readers as both a review of major applications and, while the same time, introducing new topics. For one example, in Chapter 12, where the discussion of the "marketer as a healer" arises, the author takes readers back only one chapter, to Chapter 11, where he cited the success of a Trappist monk, Abbot Joseph, for the importance of story telling....