I remember visiting my grandparents as a child for two weeks each summer. As I grew older, I watched them transition from their working days to retirement. At that time, the shift towards retirement often meant a slower pace of life, a casual retreat from social circles and carefully budgeted spending. Even though I now value those lazy days sitting on the front porch learning from my grandparents, I didn't realize that the journey they were on was transforming the experiences they would encounter for years to come. As consumers, my grandparents seemingly became virtually irrelevant to marketers of their …

What is cool? As marketers we are always trying to pinpoint that ephemeral and often intangible "it factor." Hard to define, and embodied by few-sometimes only once in a generation - you know it when you see it. In many ways, cool hasn't changed that much since Boomers were kids, but the technology with which we deliver it has.

Get any two marketers together and they'll start talking about Millennials, the holy grail of marketing. They're cool, tattooed, culturally savvy, social to a fault, and account for a whopping 24% of the U.S. population. On the flip side, they don't make a lot of money, have significant school-related debt and are much less likely to be married or own a home. So, why does it seem that every campaign is aimed at Millennials?

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."

Contemporary theories of marketing are increasingly defined in the context of collaborative relationships between a marketer and consumers that operate on behalf of meeting needs of the latter. But honoring this idea, especially in Baby Boomer markets is often problematic because a continuing focus on sales quotas pressure marketing and sales staff to concentrate more on making deals than on helping people meet their needs and fulfill their aspirations. There's a need to move from huckster to healer.