"Generation Ageless" How Baby Boomers Are Changing The Way We Live Today... And they're just getting started.

Yankelovich actually coined the term "Baby Boomer" back in the late 1960s, when they first started collecting data on this influential generation. Now, more than thirty years later, they have the most complete information on Boomers ever assembled. And they have put it all together in this groundbreaking look at America's largest and most powerful generation.

In Generation Ageless, Yankelovich president J. Walker Smith, Ph.D., and senior partner Ann Clurman, Boomers themselves, dig deep into what makes this generation tick. With fresh, original data and a wide-ranging look at everything about Boomers, they dissect Boomers into six major segments—Straight Arrows, Due Diligents, Maximizers, Sideliners, Diss/Contenteds, and Re-Activists—to provide new insights into the world's most talked-about generation. The results show key imperatives invaluable to anyone selling a product, service, or idea to this 78-million strong group.

Boomers are the dominant generation in America. Their values and aspirations set the tone for everyone. Advances in medicine and health mean that this youth-obsessed generation is now focused on an everlasting prime of life. They are literally middle age–less: holding onto their position at the top of the pyramid for as long as possible, and not fading away to their golden years. Today's fifty- and sixty-year-old Boomers are not eagerly anticipating lives of disengaged retirement. Instead, middle age–less Boomers expect another twenty or thirty years of impact and influence—albeit in a variety of ways reflective of a surfeit of agendas and ambitions they have yet to fulfill.

J. Walker Smith, Ph.D., is the president of Yankelovich, Inc., and a nationally recognized expert on marketing and social trends and their impact on businesses. He oversees The Yankelovich MONITOR®, which for more than thirty-five years has been the foremost tool tracking America's lifestyles and values. Once described by Fortune as "one of America's leading analysts of consumer trends," he is a well-known author and speaker with an eye on breaking trends in American society. Smith is a regular guest on network business news programs and is frequently quoted in the press. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

Industry to baby boomers: It's all about you
As generation ages, they are getting stronger

By BILL GLAUBER
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

If you want to know what it is like to live in a baby boomer world, walk into your neighborhood Starbucks.

After you order a latte or espresso from a friendly barista young enough to be a boomer's daughter or son, take a look at the collection of CDs for sale. The fact that there are CDs should tell you something about the target audience. The emphasis is heavy on acts that appeal to boomers: The Police, Bruce Springsteen and Joni Mitchell.

Had you walked into the coffee shop on June 5, you would have gotten the full boomer music treatment and heard, for hours on end, new songs by ex-Beatle Paul McCartney on the Starbucks-released Memory Almost Full.

It was all McCartney all the time, and you don't have to talk with many of the baristas to learn it was one of their worst days on the job. They were stuck inside their parents' music.

A quarter of the population

The kids had better get used to it.

The boomers aren't going anywhere anytime soon. The generation born between 1946 and 1964 is 78 million strong — around a quarter of the U.S. population — and still exerting tremendous cultural, political and economic influence.

For America, there really is no getting past the boomers. They're getting older, but they're also growing more powerful and — unlike the president who influenced their youth — not about to pass on the torch to a new generation of Americans.

America is on its second boomer president, George W. Bush, and the bulk of those presidential candidates eager to succeed him are also boomers. Even Barack Obama, the Democratic senator from Illinois who campaigns on a theme of getting beyond the old political fights, is himself a boomer, born in 1961.

Take a look at the bestseller list and near the top is Tom Brokaw's latest, Boom! Voices of the Sixties: Personal Reflections on the '60s and Today. Brokaw once chronicled The Greatest Generation that survived the Great Depression and helped win World War II. Here, he reflects on and talks with members of the "Sixties" generation.

Brokaw provides history and context for a generation that just can't get over itself.

Where it's all going

But there's another book out that may actually tell us more about where America and the boomers are actually headed.

Generation Ageless: How Baby Boomers Are Changing the Way We Live Today ... and They're Just Getting Started, was written by J. Walker Smith and Ann Clurman.

The title really does say it all.

The authors describe boomers as "middle ageless" or "generation ageless."

"Unfortunately, we're still going to die," says Smith, president of Yankelovich Inc. "But baby boomers are the first generation that will enjoy the new experience of getting older. It will give them opportunities in the marketplace."

For Smith, the biggest surprise was the boomers maintaining a "very youthful sensibility."

"It's not that boomers will necessarily live a lot longer, they're going to enjoy more years of an active old age," he says. "They're going to transform old age; it will be like a late middle age. It will keep many of them at the workplace."

Smith says industries and advertisers have to adapt. Boomers will have different financial needs and planning requirements compared to their parents.

Seeing the differences

Smith says the biggest mistake advertisers make is "to assume that all boomers are alike." But Smith says companies can still find a way to appeal to Maximizers who adore luxury and Diss-Contenteds who remain committed to social causes.

Think Whole Foods, where Maximizers can load up on expensive organic vegetables and free-range chickens while Diss-Contenteds can feel good about themselves while they purchase locally grown produce.

As for politics, well, the boomers aren't going to give up power.

"I think there is a chance we're going to have a lot of boomer presidents in a row," he says.

"I've sometimes described baby boomers as the Star Wars generation, the fight between good and evil, the dark side, with nothing in between. And baby boomer politics have played out this way their entire lives. It has always been a politics of polarization, a crusade on any side. I don't think boomers are going to temper their political feelings as they get older."

If anything, Smith says, the data shows boomers are going to "get re-energized in their political engagement."

But for Clurman, the most surprising finding was this: Boomers don't want to leave a legacy.
"We don't want to put our name on a building," she says.

"Most boomers are not thinking about leaving something behind; they want to get something done today," the authors write. For the boomers, apparently, it's still all about them.

SEGMENTS OF BOOMERS

J. Walker Smith and Ann Clurman, authors of Generation Ageless: How Baby Boomers Are Changing the Way We Live Today ... and They're Just Getting Started, break the boomer generation down not by age, but by six segments, including:

• Straight Arrows: "Driven by traditional values and religion"
• Due Diligents: "Think ahead and plan for the worst"
• Maximizers: "Want to do as much as possible and get the most from life"
• Sideliners: "Private, self-contained and undemanding"
• Diss-Contenteds: "See social problems they would like to fix, and their sympathies are with the protesters"
• Re-Activists: "Ready to join campaigns in support of social causes"