So let's very quickly, then, take a little look at this group of people in the middle 40%. They are completely different from the group that went before them. They feel very young - that's first of all, a truth. 66% of them, in a report that we have had provided by McCarthy & Stone (the housing people - they brought out something called The Colour Report), 66% of 65-69-year-olds feel younger. In fact, if you look at how young they felt, most of them feel younger by 10 or more years, which is quite an enormous amount.
The majority feel that old age starts at 70. I think when I started out in marketing - I don't know about you as well, Steve - we always used to talk about the over-50s, that was kind of the 'old' market. Well, it's kind of not relevant anymore to over-50s, over-50s are feeling really young - or at least I suppose I'm saying that because I hit 50 later this year! The point is that the majority don't start feeling old until they're 70 now, and in fact, guess what, if you hit the age of 70, guess when you feel old then? It's when you hit 80. So what I'm saying is, everyone feels younger than they really are, and the idea of an "over-50s market" is somewhat irrelevant now. So, they feel younger, they are younger - younger in mind and younger in physique, as well.
In terms of relationships, it's completely different for this group of people. Again, if we go back to 20 years ago in marketing, again, that over-50s saying, you used to think about single households as being those who had widows or widowers. I always remember you used to have non-working, working, employed, widowed, this sort of "forgotten", at that particular age, you're past it. Well, not at all the case now. In fact, 47% of this age group, of over-55s, anyway, are actually divorced - it's not about being widowed - that doesn't mean to say that they aren't in a relationship, it's just to say we have to look very differently at this group of people.
And not least, look at the bottom of this chart, you now have a group of women who have worked the last 30 years, who themselves have built up their own wealth and will decide, thank you very much, for themselves what to do with it. In the older generation, you could say it was more masculine-orientated and it was about the head of the house - again, that's irrelevant, to some extent, now, and it means a completely different way of talking to this audience, from being more male-orientated in more financial terms, to much more user-friendly.
In a nutshell, retirement isn't about slowing down. You don't just retire on one Friday and then on the next Monday you're suddenly drawing on a pension, that's just simply not happening anymore. Rather, the average time a person takes to retire now is 7-10 years. So people are looking to do more, retirement isn't a time for slowing down, its a time for doing more and for realising more in your life, and that comes with all sorts of challenges for brands to help customers meet those needs.
