Customer Reviews

Marketing to Leading-Edge Baby Boomers: Perceptions, Principles, Practices, Predictions

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This book achieves a dual purpose that I found extremely gratifying. It helped me understand the leading edge baby boomers in a way that I never have before. It also gave me insights about specific ways to market my services to this group.

I've read many books that give general marketing ideas, but none that goes right to the heart of this unique group of men and women and offers information that I can use to reach them.

As a bonus, the book is enjoyable to read and offers unexpected and interesting insights about the world around us

There has been a lot written about the Baby Boomers, but nothing that has been written comes even close to giving you the information you need to reach this huge demographic in an effective way.

There are many people who understand the Baby Boomers.
There are many people who understand marketing.

There are precious few who understand both.

Brent Green is one of those unique people who truly taps into the deepest needs of the Boomers. Not only that but he will give you the tools you need to meet those needs with your goods and services, and to do so over and over again.

If you want to increase your income and get inside the hearts, minds, and souls of the Boomer generation, get this book.
It will be the best investment you ever made.

If you are a baby boomer and/or marketing to baby boomers, you will find this book intriguing and enlightening. It is a marketing book, a social commentary book, and a literary book all in one.



My advice is to read chapters one and two first to get an excellent overview of generational designations, and a concise description of the baby boomer demographics and history. Then move to the Afterwords at the end of the book - "Baby Boomers at Midlife", "Becoming digital...a Boomer's trip," and "Baby Boomers, 2028." These are quick, delightful reads, and they give you an entertaining and literary feel for the subject matter and for the author's outstanding writing ability.



Once you've digested those portions, go back to the beginning of the book and dig into each chapter. You'll find a wealth of factual information, historical perspectives, and future implications for boomers and those marketing to boomers. It's a fascinating, sometimes unsettling read, especially if you are a baby boomer yourself.



The author, Brent Green, has written a well-researched, insightful and original book about marketing to the baby boomer generation. I haven't seen anything else like it out there. I highly recommend it.

Brent grasps the young/old boomer dichotomy. If you market to boomers and just play the 'forever young' card, you're in big trouble. Likewise, if you treat us only as people getting old, you've lost us again. Brent's practical approach, by using examples of actual marketing and advertising campaigns, explains to marketers what works and what doesn't. He coaches advertisers how to fuse concepts that on the surface appear to be mutually exclusive.

The 2nd edition has a section on copywriting. This makes Brent quite lethal -- a two-gunned gunslinger. In one holster, marketing -- in the other, advertising.

...you'll never know what hit you.

Reaching Boomers looks easy, but it's not. Marketing executives, both young and experienced, make too many mistakes when trying to sell to Baby Boomers. Do it wrong, and this cash-rich market will totally ignore what you have to say.

In this book, Brent Green shows you how to get their attention and make them reach for their wallets.

No one knows baby boomers better than this leading-edge boomer himself.....and no one has studied the ways other generations perceive baby boomers more than Brent Green. This makes his newly expanded bible on baby boomers the authoritative source on this huge generation's economic realities, its social priorities, and its new energy for youthful lifestyles.

In his first edition, Green pulled the peel off the way baby boomers have turned away from the inflexible, stultifying habits of their parents. As the title of this Second Edition says, he has added perceptions, principles, practices, and predictions here that give any reader the best possible understanding of the biggest, richest generation in America. If you're selling anything baby boomers might want, you've got to read this book.

Greg Dobbs, Executive Editor, BoomerCafé.com

Marketing to Leading-Edge Baby Boomers absorbs one's own thoughts of how Vietnam & the '60's and '70's chiseled much of this generation's current perspectives and values. Brent Green succinctly describes how this baby-boom generation opts to retain their youth, exuberances, and imperatives from that '70's era, but in a more mature, seasoned way. An insightful take on who we were, and are as a demographic result of this time in our history. The chapter on how boomers don't see themselves necessarily growing older in lifestyle choices, but rather, living younger - so well states the context in which this group seeks its current lifestyle and consumption choices. A must read for putting into text a descriptive canvas of this unique generation...

I am a student of nonfiction books about baby boomers. Although I'm a member of so-called Generation X, my job demands that I stay on top of evolving thought leadership about boomers. Further, my two older siblings are boomers. In reviewing the reviews for boomer-focused books on Amazon, I've noticed something. The one-star critics of these books tend to be glib, lack depth in their analyses, and dismiss the books, not so much because of content, but because the books are usually sympathetic to the generation or perhaps more liberal ideologies. Let's face it: some people are furious at boomers. Their anger shows. To the contrary, Green's book is one of the best I've read on marketing to this generation, and one of my brothers -- also in marketing -- agrees. It's not just because Green offers a wealth of strategic and tactical insights, especially for those new to this market, but also because he adds texture with actual case studies and historical anecdotes. It's clear that this marketer and author knows what he's writing about as a practitioner, not just a pundit or academic. He informs and educates, but yet he tells stories that illuminate. Further, I also read his first edition, and he was ahead of the explosion of interest around boomers by at least two or three years -- light years in the marketing world.

The Baby Boom generation is characterized by its clear dominance of the popular culture of yuppie consumerism. Now members of that influential generation are entering their fifties with more disposable income than any previous generation. This new and expanded second edition of Marketing To Leading-Edge Baby Boomers: Perceptions, Principles, Practices, Predictions by marketing creative director, strategist, and copywriter Brent Green covers all of the insights and strategies necessary to successfully sell products and services to this now aging population. Readers will come to understand critical "bipolar metavalues" that influence Boomer buying decisions; learn how to select the right advertising media to achieve marketing goals; realize why and how mature audiences receive advertising messages differently; create advertising and marketing programs that transform a brand into a Boomer favorite; receive instruction on just how to plan and organizing "bandwagon" Boomer events and promotions, explore the opportunities for reaching Boomers through the Internet, and so much more. If you are marketing a product or service to the Baby Boom generation, then you need to give a careful and reflective reading to what Brent Green has to say about selling to the Boomers in today's highly competitive and frequently volatile marketplace.

This author has truly captured the essence of the values that distinguish boomers from other generations. What sets this book apart -- and makes it an important choice for companies and advertising agencies interested in the boomer market -- is Green's ability to articulate how boomer values and shared life experiences can be addressed through powerful cohort marketing communication campaigns. The book has several interesting hallmarks, including concise chapters that deal thematically with boomer values, case studies that reveal how these insights can be developed into effective marketing campaigns and a short story that adds artistic and evocative texture to the left-brain thinking driving most marketing campaigns. Because of his stanch defense of boomers, a generation popularly criticized in the media, the author will attract some critics who themselves harbor deep prejudices against boomers. This has been aptly demonstrated by one ascerbic review posted recently, lacking in depth or specificity. It's about time that someone stepped forward with a strident voice in defense of boomers, and particularly their economic and business importance.

As the words "aging boomer" rise in frequency in marketing venues, like feathered scavengers circling a fallen animal in the bush, countless boomer "experts" appear out of nowhere offering clients "the" answer to cashing in big on so-called boomer markets.
Most of what most of these "experts" dish out to whomsoever will listen is bunk. However, Brent Green's "Marketing to Leading Edge Boomers," is solid. It approaches the task of explaining where boomers -- especially leading edge boomers who have always been the most activist segment of the boomer cohort -- are in their worldviews, values, needs and behavior as they move ahead on their journey through the second half of their lives.

While Green's book is not a "how to" recipe book for embarking on that new or next campaign targeting boomers, it is better than that. The formulaic approaches that most readers of marketing books hope to glean from their readings just don't hack it in older boomer markets. The greater degree of individuation, introspectiveness and autonomy that typically emerges in the second half of makes knowledge of the traits of boomers' behavior in the second half of their lives -- which Green delivers on -- more useful that absolutist prescriptions for what to do that characterize most books in the marketing genre.