Grey Power: Older Workers as Older Customers

This chapter explores the increasing importance of “grey power” in the labour market and the marketplace. To fully understand grey market potential, companies need to develop an understanding of individual older customers and their broader social contexts in terms of both their varying immediate household compositions, and their intergenerational relationships. In this chapter we first challenge stereotypes and then introduce a model of older-person segmentation. The frame of analysis is then extended beyond the individual older customer in order to assess the range of “future households” in which the old will increasingly play a key role when purchasing decisions are being made. We provide a wealth/health segmentation for firms seeking to develop older customer strategies, and supplement this with a categorization of future households and the issues raised by intergenerational dynamics. This is then used to challenge false assumptions about older household compositions in the twenty-first century. In turn, this provides a segmentation of the old as workers and as customers in a variety of social contexts, which we hope offers some useful tools for companies seeking to capitalize on grey power now and into the future.