Few marketing decisions matter more than whom a brand is for. Yet few inspire such elaborate ways of being wrong.
Teams fall for micro-targets and cultural marketing’s seductive vocabulary – tribes, communities, identities, subcultures – as if an interesting name made a target valuable. The evidence popularised by Byron Sharp, professor of marketing science at the University of South Australia, points in a less glamorous direction: consumer brands usually grow by building salience among as many category buyers as possible.
The most persistent mistake is the reflex to go younger – to “rejuvenate the brand”, as they say. Its cause is not strategic foresight but self-projection: marketing teams select consumers like themselves, then wrap that preference in a narrative that appears logical and sounds forward-looking – “we need to recruit the next generation” – dressing up a personal bias as long-term thinking.
Part of the answer is simply who chooses the target. Marketing departments and agencies skew young, urban, educated and progressive. Younger consumers therefore feel familiar: they share the same codes, platforms and cultural reference points. Understanding older, lower-income, suburban or rural consumers requires more work and a less fashionable skill: empathy.
Youth also signals energy and relevance. The mistake is to assume that because youth is appealing, older consumers must aspire to it. Most adults do not want to adopt the codes of people half their age, they want to feel contemporary on their own terms. David Attenborough need not sound like Stormzy, nor Helen Mirren dress like Dua Lipa. Brands can be modern without asking consumers to pretend they are younger.
Is youth really good business?
Another confusion is economic: the consumers marketers find most glamorous are not necessarily the most valuable. In England, 38% of people are over 50. ONS data put median household wealth above £500,000 for 65 to 74-year-olds, against £15,200 for 16 to 24-year-olds. That makes “young equals potential” look heroic.
Age bands reveal the same bias: 18-24, 25-34, 35-49 and then, with a weary shrug, 50+. The older the consumer, the broader the segment becomes – an almost mathematical expression of bias. We distinguish 22 from 27 as if five years changed the species, then bundle decades of different lives, incomes and aspirations into one mass.
The case for “recruiting the next generation” also rests on two shaky assumptions: that winning consumers young means keeping them for life and that older consumers are less valuable because “they will die eventually” – an argument I have heard, horrifyingly, more than once.
The first may have seemed plausible in the 1960s. But today’s fickle consumers switch brands, channels and habits. Even healthy brands are always losing buyers. Growth therefore depends less on capturing one generation early than on continually recruiting the people most likely to buy. The second assumption confuses lifespan with customer value: in many categories, older shoppers may spend more, buy more frequently or be cheaper to reach because they consume traditional mass media.
Taken literally, this logic would tell nappy brands to advertise to teenagers because they are tomorrow’s parents. Nobody does: the need does not yet exist and the return relies more on faith than finance.
Worse, brands start seeing their own buyers as yesterday’s people. Sometimes the contempt becomes explicit. I once heard an agency describe an older, low-income audience for a mainstream gin brand as “the elderly and defeated”. Their only defeat, apparently, was not looking good on a mood board.
Rejuvenation can produce the worst result: losing the buyers who fund the brand without gaining enough younger ones. A classic, if now slightly vintage, example is KFC in Britain. In 2005, youth-focused snacks turned the brand into a low-ticket snack destination while families – spending almost three times as much as young adults – drifted away. Its recovery strategy made families as the primary target, with younger consumers retained as the secondary one.
Recruit buyers, not generations
Younger consumers may sometimes be the right target. But they must earn their place like any other group: through the size of the opportunity, the fit between their needs and the brand’s offer, the cost of reaching and converting them, and their profit potential.
So next time you hear “we need to recruit the next generation to rejuvenate the brand”, switch on your BS detector – or simply leave the room.
François Bazini is a former International CMO at Suntory. He is now teaching at IE Business School in Madrid, and has founded Chesco Advisory Partners to help established brands reignite growth and prevent or reverse decline
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