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Silver Linings: Selling to the Expanding Mature Market
In just a year, the first baby boomers will be turning sixty. At this point, halfway into the first decade of the twenty-first century, buzz about a mature market boom has become established. Consultants, strategists, researchers, and business leaders are all telling us how essential it is for commercial interests to get big responses from the 40-and-50+ market. Fortunes are being spent developing strategies to just this end.

Some long-sighted experts, however, saw this trend coming well in advance. Herschell Gordon Lewis's Silver Linings: Selling to the Expanding Mature Market is as useful and applicable today as when it was first published in 1996 and expounded the shape of marketing to come.

The author, highly experienced in the field of copywriting and advertising as well as a member of the mature market, presented with this book a tool of lasting value for advertisers, marketers and business leaders. Points are well illustrated with dozens of examples of advertisements which succeed in their aims to varying degrees. Some of its predictions about the future of marketing to mature consumers have already come to pass, others are sure to follow as the baby boomer generation continues to expand this increasingly lucrative market demographic.

"Niche market," wrote Lewis, is an outdated term that used to be applied to mature consumers. The market had already in 1996 grown too large and too mainstream to be consigned to this category. It is the only U.S. market that will experience outstanding growth in the twenty-first century, and this book explodes many of the myths that – at least until Silver Lining was published and circulated – have hampered marketer's ability to understand and effectively target mature consumers.

The world of mature-market advertising, according to Lewis, has three types of "losers." One is those who don't have any grasp of the concepts that will appeal to seniors, and waste large sums of money on campaigns that mature consumers ignore or view with contempt. The second is those who hold a severely restricted view of senior interests and affinities, and fail to exploit the mature market's growing spending power and broad-mindedness. The third category is made up of those who rightly intuit seniors are interested in retaining youthfulness, but wrongly believe that age-inappropriate messages targeted at "hipsters" will do the trick from a marketing standpoint.With his timely and prescient volume, Lewis shows why the old paradigms will no longer work and helps point the way to something new. His book is a valuable contribution to any library on the subject.

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