Socially Aware Marketing?

There's a boom in adult Japanese taking lessons to master playing consoles with a view to delaying the onset of dementia.

While providing a relatively saturated market with a new growth opportunity, this event also highlights the need for the marketers to shift their worldview. Assigning the epithet "grey gamers" to a segment they define as people over forty hardly suggests an affinity with these oldies!

We're all going to be over forty one day and, just looking around today, we can see that "older" consumers are neither anonymously grey nor grey in hair colour (especially in Japan). In fact, they are the majority - the dominant segment in terms of numbers and spending power.

The marketing industry knows this and holds expensive conferences to discuss the implications, but that counts for nothing if they can't quit their addiction to meaningless pigeonholing.