HUMBUG
Come Fly With Us
There's money to be had from them there oldies
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Leisure travel spend in Europe is enormous with Europeans taking some 2.6 billion international trips in 2022, making up the largest market in the travel, leisure and hospitality industry in the world.
(Eurostat 2022. Nicolau, Losada, Alen and Dominguez. 2020)
Tourists aged 65 years and over accounted for nearly 1 in 4 tourism nights for private purposes spent by EU residents in 2022.
(Eurostat. 2022)
Expedia Media Solutions poll shows ‘Baby boomers’ spend more on travelling than any other age group.
(Expedia. 2024)
Academia have observed that tourism behaviour is affected by individual’s life events (which alter habits and preferences over time).
(Humber, Milne & Hyde. 2019)
Here in the UK mature consumers are the most valuable group, with 70% of all UK household wealth and the 65+ forecast to be spending 63p out of every £1 by 2040.
(Resolution Foundation. 2020)
UK residents made over 85 million international trips in 2023, worth over £70 billion, and around 126 million overnight visits within Great Britain, spending another £33 billion.
(ONS Travel Trends. 2023)
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It’s safe to say that with age comes wealth, significant spending power, more leisure time, a desire to travel, (often outspending the younger generation of tourists (Tiago, Couto, Tago & Faria.2016)), and a load of key life events which may impact the lot.
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What a perfect playground for Humbug!
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Nose to the ground, tail in the air, spurred on by these observations we headed off to the famous TGI ‘Arc of Life’, which maps life events with age, enabling targeting decisions to be made based on real-life experiences.
But oh dear, life seems to be pretty experienceless post 54:
Academics disappointed in mature consumer research
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Straight on the dog and bone to our friendly professors at Brunel University Business School, Danae and Dorothy, we asked them to provide a synthesis of existing mature consumer research published in top tier tourism or leisure journals since 2010 which related to consumer purchase behaviours when considering a significant travel or leisure spend.
69 papers reviewed. 22 published from 2021 onwards. Only 1 referenced COVID.
Their conclusion, ‘Academic literature around the mature consumer is small in scope, especially after COVID’.
However, there were clear pointers highlighting the need for experience-related, gender-specific approaches, which adopt community-building strategies, and a host of new opportunities and niches based on life events, which remain undocumented and unexplored.
So, in January, to put some meat on the bones, we tracked what advertisers were up to in terms of targeting the mature consumer with their leisure travel products.
We reviewed some 200+ press ads, subscribed to 50 odd digital mailing lists, and guess what? Much of what we have seen demonstrates most advertisers have not been given good advice on how best to engage a fascinatingly misunderstood beast, someone born between 1946 and 1964, in their spending prime, culturally and psychologically developed from the ‘age of consumerism’ to look after themselves and expect the world ‘my way’.
Oops.
Real people say 'come on, get real'
Not finished...in February we spoke to 80 or so members of our Humbug Club (a group of our mates, peers and colleagues all aged 55+) and asked questions like:
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Has the way you think, feel and act towards advertising changed as you get older?
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Do you think advertisers know how best to talk to older consumers?
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What’s your view on the digital experience vs a personal or F2F one, when searching for travel and leisure activities to do?
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…and another 23 or so questions, most open-ended, around leisure travel services, brands, purchases, expectations, etc.
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They were searingly blunt and kindly critical whilst offering up plenty of food for thought.
And lastly, la piece de resistance, in March we filmed 60 relatively affluent people aged 59+ and asked them 4 questions relating to key life events that have or will impact on their travel decisions. And they served up 4 hours of insight which we’ve condensed into a 6-minute brain dump.
Grab a stiff drink and have a watch:
We say 'here's 4 points to ponder'
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1. Can advertisers in this sector do more to engage and titillate mature consumers to grab more of their stash?
We’ve 30 mins of thoughts on why, when and how, which we will sprinkle with ideas for your business based on our research. Just book yourself in, ideally for a proper meeting, you know rooms, doors, chairs, that sort of thing. Sadly, you will have to meet Quentin.
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2. Are the 15 key life events we’ve unearthed, that impact mature consumers’ leisure travel purchase behaviour, worth a look?
We’ve mapped them out in our Humbug's Later Life’s Cresta Run Model, and Tim, our resident loyalty guru, can’t wait to slide you through it.
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3. Are mature consumers bored rigid with much of today’s advertising, and that their descriptions of it as dull, assumptive, uninspiring, patronising, too woke, dishonest etc. fair?
Our dinky advertising review process, Mustn't Grumble, will quickly highlight where your marketing comms can be tweaked and offers suggestions for that tweaking. To give it a go only costs £5k, which in the context of grabbing a bigger share of £100 billion spend, is probably worth it.
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4. Has our proactive work prodded a lurking gut feeling that you should review how you are targeting the mature consumer? And reminded you it is the wealthiest group in the UK.
We’ve created a natty mature customer check, Are You Being Served, that for £10k will deliver a benchmark report in 10 working days and get you on the road to planning next years campaigns.
It picks up on Beresford’s aggregation of marginal gains approach and is bread-and-butter stuff for Mark of course, or is that rarebit?
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Thanks for getting this far, if you're in the leisure business, or any other frankly, and need another perspective, just give us a call and let's chat.
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Oh, and be reassured, we don’t have the issue the IPA highlighted when discussing why agencies don’t have a better understanding of over-50’s media consumption, namely that ‘77% of UK agency staff under 40, 94% under 50’…
(IPA media research podcast about over 50’s media consumption - Representing-over-50s-in-advertising. July 2022)
We're 100% over 50.
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TO GET A COPY OF OUR BLUE PAPER FILL IN THE FORM AND ALL WILL BE REVEALED!
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