Understand the thinking behind the company name and you soon tap into the ethos of the Humbug Partnership, founded in 2023 by marketing experts and brand builders Quentin Boyes and Mark Taylor. Friends since their 20s, the two Baby Boomer businessmen had named their previous agencies after popular sweets, so Humbug seemed not just a logical third, but also the perfect moniker for a specialist agency aiming to debunk entrenched beliefs about marketing to this age group. And the website address? What else but www.bahhumbugs.co.uk?
‘So many companies are talking to Baby Boomers in completely the wrong way (who Quentin much prefers to simply call ‘mature consumers’), and not paying enough attention to the fact that they have so much disposable income to spend,’ says Quentin, who worked for advertising and marketing agencies after university, culminating in McCann Erikson London. Since 1999 he has worked internationally in marketing services, his passion gradually moving into building brand strategies based on data research and analysis. He and Mark have been joined at Humbug by another old friend, Tim Birchinall, a specialist in loyalty schemes and member engagement programmes.
‘We have a wealth of experience between us but don’t want to sound like an agency of old people who have been knocking round the industry for 40 years,’ laughs Quentin, who secured a substantial Government grant from the Innovate UK Creative Catalyst Programme enabling Humbug to start 12 months of heavy duty research, working with Brunel University and two well respected independent data scientists.
‘This helped us to produce a number of original planning tools and go on to win our first client, a holiday company, and create some innovative insight work seeking to review and potentially reposition some of the brands in their portfolio. One involved their call centre to extract real-time insights to feed into ongoing panel research with existing customers, and another targeted tough to reach potential new customers, based overseas. Both produced excellent results.’
Quentin discovered the Silver Marketing Association whilst looking for trade associations catering for the Baby Boomer sector. He liked what he saw and in 2025, Humbug sponsored part of the SMA Summit, a relationship he plans to carry on at the 2026 event where Humbug will again sponsor and Quentin hopes to be one of the key speakers and share some stories and insights from the library of insights Humbug has curated into delivering effective advertising to mature consumers.
‘Silver Marketing get what we are trying to do, and I really liked their commitment to bringing mature market businesses together,’ he says. ‘We met our first client through the Association, and I am sure there will be more to come.’
In recent months, Humbug have invested considerable time researching how Baby Boomers engage with the health and wellbeing market for self-care, especially with regard to digital platforms. This work was carried out working with Silversurfers, introduced to Humbug by the Silver Marketing Association. Quentin was being slightly secretive around whether mature consumers use digital services and if so, which ones and how. What is certain is that their insights will provide a valuable resource for future clients working in this sector.
‘I wrote a Blue Paper about travel and leisure, blue representing the sea,’ laughs Quentin. ‘A Black Paper for the funeral industry and now I’m working on a Green Paper for health and wellbeing, green being the colour of pharmacies!’
‘Any surprises? Certainly, how mature consumers tend not to go straight to NHS online or to the NHS app for minor ailments, even though they have trust in the Service. I think the Government have a huge problem with this lack of interaction from that generation.
Another interesting find was how companies often assume that mature customers are retired, but this really isn’t the case, and many older consumers say they would trust their employers to help them over health issues, particularly via digital tools. Our age group has massive trust issues with technology, not because they don’t know how to use it but because they don’t trust the people using our data. So, from a marketing perspective, specialist partnerships will be very important.’
Humbug is already working on other marketing tools that will enable clients to target their audience more effectively. And for a company named after a sweet, it is not surprising that these too have offbeat names. Cresta Run offers up a 15-year life plan across the stages of mature consumer spending related to 22 key life events they have researched, whilst Ozzy takes a new approach to deliver a unique cluster segmentation tool for this market simply using just seven pertinent questions.
Why Ozzy? ‘Because Ozzy Osbourne died just as we were putting it together, but also because he was a big character who spoke his mind,’ explains Quentin. ‘A real individual, like so many of us Baby Boomers!’
Quentin was interviewed by journalist Gillian Thornton.
