I reported in an earlier column this week that I had recently spent a few weeks in the bustling city of UBud, host to the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival. For marketers still pondering how to connect with women, a trip to this event, should be on your List of Things To Do.

The delegates were primarily women and Boomers at that, who have very deep and rich purses.

One of the reasons that this Festival has been so successful is due to the Australian Boomer who initiated the event with the Balinese government and manages it annually.  Janette de Neef not only runs the Festival but, with her Balinese husband owns the successful Cafe Luna Emporium and a raft of accommodation and food venues in the city.

She is a great example of today’s boomer woman who is brimming with confidence.  According to marketing to women US expert Marti Barletta, boomer women say that getting older better equips them to make decisions more confidently than when they were younger. In the Girlfriend Groups conducted with DDB Chicago, boomer women told them they know how to handle unexpected turbulence and how to get around obstacles in ways that younger women have yet to figure out.

“With age comes experience. And with experience comes wisdom. This wisdom has given Boomer women confidence and control over their lives, indeed a swagger, that, in some respects, makes younger women look a touch wimpy,” Barletta claims.

And the statistics in the following table can inform many marketing to Boomer women strategies:

For Boomer women, there is significant power in the realisation that they can master the curveballs and “high hard ones” that life throws at them, and that they can do it with a high degree of equanimity and aplomb.

I observed this over and over again in Bali, while it was the younger women who mainly travelled in female only groups or with their male partners, it was the Boomers who were on their own, fronting up with confidence to the vagaries of life in Bali. They were not only attending the Festival in droves, but were leading the various groups of volunteers. And those Australia, US and American  ex-pats living on the island were running their own property, accommodation, hospitality and artistic businesses.

Barletta believes that this trend means two things:

1.     Boomer women’s confidence also gives them the drive to keep their lives moving forward-which represents a significant marketing opportunity.

2.    When marketing and selling to Boomer women, companies must honour Boomer women’s confidence in themselves. That is a good way to build trust with this group.

She suggests that  you ask your marketing and sales departments two questions-

How will you approach this marketing opportunity? And, Does your current sales approach fit with how Boomer women actually view themselves?

This entry was posted on Friday, October 21st, 2011 at 2:38 pm and is filed under My Updates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.