• by Ed Nevraumont , January 8, 2015

When I search for “fighting the last war” in Google, I get 245 million results. Many of the articles are about how generals often train their armies for tactics that are already obsolete or they go into specifics, like how the Maginot Line was built to protect France from a WWI version of Germany. Another set of articles are about metaphors of the saying: “Microsoft is fighting the last war by buying Nokia’s handsets,” or “Investors are fighting the last war using techniques that will only lose them money now.”

This tendency to solve for the last problem instead of the current one is very prevalent in marketing to the Boomer generation. The market is finally realizing that even Boomers are making their buying decisions online. One-third of the more than 195 million Internet users in the U.S. are adults age 50 or older, and they spend an average of $7 billion online annually. 

From Desktop to Mobile: Connecting to Boomers Online

Just as marketers are deciding to shift their resources from offline to online, they are missing the next shift. Boomers are making the even more dramatic switch from online desktop to online mobile.

I still hear stories about how “My mom doesn’t know how to download an app,” or “My dad still doesn’t know how to reply all.” But those stories miss the bigger picture: In 2015 there will be zero growth in Boomers desktop online presence. Zero. We aren’t at the start of a Boomer shift online – we are at the end. Instead, all those eyeballs are going to move to mobile.

We saw it happen in 2014. After significant growth for the last three years, 2014 market growth in desktop slowed to a crawl. Almost all the online growth came from mobile. By 2016, I would not be surprised to see the desktop presence of Boomers actually shrink.

The nice thing about targeting the Boomer audience is that you don’t need to be a “Cassandra,” or a fortune teller. Boomer trends definitely lag behind the Millennial. After watching Uber and Postmates and Tinder dominate their respective marketplaces by being “mobile-first,” no one would consider launching a new Millennial service “desktop first.” But there seems to be an impression that Boomers are so far behind Millennials in technology that we are fine to focus on “desktop first” for their market. The opinion is correct that Boomers are behind Millennials, but they aren’t that far behind. Uber was founded in 2009 and that was only six years ago.

While it is smart that you are finally starting to think about marketing to Boomers online, don’t think you have cracked the case. When you shift your Boomer marketing spend from offline to desktop, you are definitely fighting the last war.