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 David Wolfe, principal author of Ageless Marketing: Strategies for Reaching the Hearts and Minds of the New Customer Majority says he never quite grew up. “You know how little kids have endless curiosity and keep asking, “Why? Why? Why? That’s how I am many decades after my siblings stopped asking why. And what I’ve remained most curious about is why people – including me, maybe especially me – do what they do.”
His deep interest in human behavior began when he was a young landscape architect wanting to know how people using gardens, playgrounds and communities he designed would react to his design decisions. “So I started reading books on behavior. Eventually I began focusing on the primal origins of behavior in the brain outside the realms of consciousness.”
Until recently, he was virtually alone among marketing professionals in seeing the value of new insights about the brain to marketers. “It’s only a matter of time, before brain science will have a place in business schools, especially in marketing studies. Some of our deepest beliefs about human behavior are as flawed as believing the earth is flat. Science ultimately showed people what the eyes couldn’t see, namely that the earth is round. Now science is showing us that human behavior works differently than we have thought.”
His book, Ageless Marketing, which includes two chapters by Robert E. Snyder when he headed J. Walter Thompson’s Mature Market Group, connects important findings from recent brain research with tenets of classical psychology to demonstrate the need for new ways of thinking and executing marketing in the era of the New Customer
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Majority – those people 40 and older who now outnumber adults 18-39 by 125 million to 85 million.
David Wolfe, an internationally recognized expert in consumer behavior, originated developmental relationship marketing (DRM), which is the conceptual foundation of Ageless Marketing. He wrote Serving the Ageless Market (McGraw-Hill, 1990), released in Japanese in 1993. His assignments have taken him to Asia, Africa, and Europe.
DRM is a marketing platform that facilitates connections in between products and customers’ root motivations – powerful urges to satisfy needs that can’t be identified in traditional research because, as recent findings in brain science indicate, the roots of motivations lie outside the conscious mind. This is why frequent disconnects arise between what consumers tell researchers and what ultimately happens in the marketplace.
DRM provides guidance for resolving these disconnects through protocols based on new views of mental operations in brain science and from developmental psychology, which has charted predictable changes across the life span in people’s worldviews, needs, motivations. Knowledge of these changes enables surprisingly accurate anticipation of customer behavior before conducting any traditional research.
DRM has particular value in today’s markets because as boomers swell the ranks of older customers, many traditional marketing practices are becoming obsolete, for example, the idea that selling product features and benefits is primary. The customer experience is now widely claimed to be primary. This and other departures from traditional ideas stems from the new dominance of the marketplace’s by people in the second half of life when experiential desires often overtake materialistic desires in their influence on lifestyles and buying behavior.
The emergence of the New Customer Majority, combined with the Internet’s shift of the information balance of power to consumers, has radically changed the rules of marketplace engagement. David Wolfe is widely acknowledged as the leading expert on the behavioral foundations of the new rules and how to play by them.
Click here for a sampling of David Wolfe’s clients and other books and articles he has written.
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Ageless Marketing Explained 