Data gaps and assumptions about ageing are shaping commercial decision making and influencing the products, services and marketing that older consumers encounter every day, argues a new report. Some businesses overlook older consumers altogether, while many underestimate their capability and ignore – or are ignorant of – their aspiration and lifestyle, says the Centre for Ageing Better. There are two main roots of this problem: the lumping together of all adults receiving the state penson into a single, homogenous group when “better age disaggregation leads to better marketing strategy”. And “the tendency to judge success primarily through economic indicators such as GDP, productivity and labour market participation, has resulted in retirement being framed as a period of dependency, with the significant non-market contributions of older people entirely overlooked”. Consequences include sports science, exercise and physical activity research that tends to view the market through a “deficit-based lens that emphasises frailty, dependency and decline, rather than capability and continued athletic potential”.
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