MichaelSullivan
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Jun 26, 2009, 8:01 AM
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How Life Experiences Shape Housing Decisions
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By Michael P. Sullivan
50-Plus Communications Consulting: www.graymoney.biz
Most prospects for your retirement community are Baby Boomers or senior adults. Selling to each generation is different. When we conduct training workshops or marketing consulting, we find that sales associates are vaguely aware that they need to approach sales communication differently.
Understanding the mindset of each generation and communicating sales information in a more relevant manner is one way your sales staff can create a distinguishable difference and increase sales.
You wouldn’t necessarily emphasize team-play, duty, and frugality in dealing with Boomer-age clients. But, those are good examples of the kinds of things you might very well emphasize in dealing with the World War II generation.
Explaining unfamiliar concepts by anchoring your explanation to their prior experience is something your staff should do routinely for clients age 50 and over. You might be in the habit of making firm recommendations to customers in their late 60s on up. But, in dealing with Boomers, you are almost always better off offering choices.
Each generation has had a unique set of experiences and it is marked by this unique passage in history. As they grow older, they continue to respond to the world in ways they learned long, long ago. From one generation to the next, distinctive differences arise because of a different historical perspective.
Boomers and Older Adults
Two generations of prospects for retirement homes are significant. Baby Boomers – ages 45-63 and Older Adults – those from their mid-60s and up.
The two are differentiated in terms of how they perceive and evaluate information. Each bases its decisions on distinct values and attitudes developed during its formative years.
In our part of the world, more so than other places that change more slowly, those experiences are quite different from one generation to another because the times are quite different. Our shared experiences are well formed by our late teens and early 20s.
German sociologist Karl Mannheim called those shared feelings of generations, “zeitgeist” -- a spirit of the times. Today’s Older Adults have a zeitgeist or personal history that included World War II, the Great Depression, the stock market crash of 1929.
These events shaped their lives and their attitudes about major decisions like housing. They are marked by those experiences and as they grow older they continue to respond to the world in ways they learned long ago.
Older Adults are driven by duty; by concepts of obligation to others. And they are driven more by concerns about what they owe to others. They believe in working hard for their rewards. They also feel that self-sacrifice especially for their adult children, grandchildren and great grandchildren is important.
As a group, they tend to respect authority. They also can appear to be very frugal, and in general they exercise caution.
Their passage through history was marked by a number of significant worldwide events. The Boomer generation’s passage through history was marked by a different set of events.
As the majority of Boomers moved through their adolescent years and into young adulthood, they experienced radical societal changes. These included the Vietnam War, Woodstock, Watergate, the civil rights movement, women’s lib movement, and the assassinations of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King.
The consequences of those shared experiences are that the attitude of Boomers changed. They came away from those times distrusting and challenging institutions. They became more insistently individualistic, more “me-oriented” and more independent. Their attitude contrasted with their parents. Their parents considered a large, established institution as credible, because it was a large, established institution. For Boomers, such credibility is not instantly accorded.
Experiences Mean More with Age
The ability to use life experiences increases with age. As we age, we have more experiences to draw on and they become more powerful. We cannot know the unique experiences of an individual Boomer or Older Adult or how those experiences influence responses to your housing recommendations. But we can understand the shared experiences our older customers bring to the table and how those experiences shape their response to information about housing issues.
By Michael P. Sullivan, President, 50-Plus Communications Consulting, Charlotte North Carolina, (704) 554-7863. Mike consults and trains staff at retirement facilities, home care living firms, financial services and health care organizations. His book, “101 Easy Ways to Increase Business with Boomerplus Clients” is available on his website, www.graymoney.biz. Contact him at mps50plus@aol.com.
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(This post was edited by MichaelSullivan on Jun 26, 2009, 8:06 AM)
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