Increasingly there appears to be a conundrum in many business strategies – to encourage online and self-service behaviours and yet over 1/3 of the population is now over 50. How can organisations develop better support to aide the learning of this age group and encourage greater technology use?
Companies are exploring ways to shift to ‘self-service’ to enable 24 hour service to the consumer at lower cost to the business. However, one group may be feeling increasingly disenfranchised from this process – the over 50s. This group has not grown up with technology in the same way in which younger groups have done. Unsurprisingly, they report feeling ‘like immigrants’ (Ribak, 2001) in the face of new technologies. However, this is the fastest growing demographic in Britain today, with a large amount of spending power.
What steps are older consumers taking themselves in order to negotiate ever more complex demands of the self-service economy in a digital language that is in many cases, a foreign language?
- Better understand the online behaviours of the adaptive immigrants (people aged 35+).
- Segment this group into smaller groups according to shared attitudes and behaviours, explaining how each group behaves.
- Create an online segmentation that is not based on age but on motivations and ability to learn internet use.
- Better support and interact with each group online, encouraging and increasing activity with your brand online.
- Focus on how older age groups ‘learn’ and ‘get to grips’ with the Internet, enabling us to focus on how to better support them online.
- Provide a ‘client toolkit’ to demonstrate which segments exist within their customer base – target support and learning to specific target groups.
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