How Older People Think about Images of Aging in Advertising and the Media.

Abstract

Age may not be central in defining who older people think they are. How people see others their in advertising and media depends upon how they think about their own aging and how they think about in general. PERCEPTIONS OF AGING is a moving target. During first two months of 2000, National Council on Aging (NCOA) conducted a national survey on public and personal perceptions of aging in United States. The Louis Harris polling organization collected data. NCOA was able to compare its findings with those of a nearly identical survey conducted in 1974, a generation earlier. The researchers found that during that twenty-five-year period, proportion of older Americans who identified health, income, loneliness, and crime as very serious personal problems substantially declined. As in 1974-, in 2000 younger respondents perceived old-age problems as more serious than did older respondents themselves. The surveys clearly document erosion of chronological as a central indicator ofthe experience of aging (Whitelaw, 2000). That is, is not very central in defining who older people think they are. Younger people tend to have a more defined idea about what is like than older people do.What a challenge it must be, then, for marketers who want to target mature market:' The category of age maintained a conceptual unity until lifecourse theory emerged in 1960s, emphasizing that was part of a lifelong developmental process. During 1980s and 1990s, life-course theory became much more sophisticated. This perspective addressed temporal variations across life course, and fact that individual's life course is embedded in relationships with others. In addition, life-course theory now emphasizes that lives are influenced by historical times and places that they experienced over their lifetimes. Old is no longer a unified concept. A major discovery of i98os in American social gerontology was great diversity of people of retirement age. Categories such as the elderly were rendered meaningless. Whereas people of a wide range of ages had been grouped together as old for analytic purposes, researchers began to disagregate this single large category into smaller categories like young-old and old-old and process accelerated and expanded. But while many scholars have warned against using averages to describe older population, few have actually analyzed nature, extent, and patterns of its heterogeneity (Dannefer, 1988). Demographers have consistently called attention to diversity of older Americans during past two decades, showing wide spread of income, assets, education, employment, and health status (Treas and Longino, 1997). Casalanti (1996) points to variations among older people that would help account for their diversity For example, older women and men differ on a wide variety of economic and health measures, as do African Americans and European Americans. So reality of aging, or at least its implications, may differ considerably depending upon one's gender and background. Body image is particularly difficult to get right in marketing to any part of older population. Social gerontologists have only recently begun to focus on concept of body, but there is indeed a concern among older people about their changed physical appearance-their lived bodies (Katz, 1999). Friedan (1993) argues that consumer culture promotes this concern and then exploits it. According to Morris (1998), consumer culture is preoccupied with perfect bodies, their images spread through glamorized representations in advertising and increasing dominance of visual image in Western culture. Thus, consumer society creates negative language about and images of later life, by implication if not directly, by valuing and emphasizing youthful body image. Indeed, some writers (e. …