Keywords

1 France: A Life-Size Laboratory About Elderly, Consumption and New Media?

It is now international commonsense among people working in the extended marketing professional field to state that more and more countries, especially the richest, are entering a new area of mass consumption that will be deeply linked and, in some respect, ruled or a least driven by older people purchases. This is especially the case in most European countries.

The aging of populations is one of the great stakes of the decades to come. Its impact will be huge in society and more especially on an economic point of view. As given by the United Nations: “Globally, population aged 60 or over is growing faster than all younger age groups”, this phenomenon is defined and named population ageing. In 2017, Japan (33%) and Israël (29%) are the countries with the most significant populations over 60, then comes Europe as a whole (from 25 to 29%), Canada and China (23%) and the USA (22%) [1]. These numbers are remarkable since, regarding the entire planet, people over 60 are only 13% and 2% over 80. However, this situation will be considerably different around 2050, when 25% of global the population will be over 60, except for Africa. In Europe, at that time, 35% of the population will be concerned.

One of the critical findings given by the United Nations concerns people over 80 whose number will triple by 2050. Their specificity in 2018 is that 27% of them live in Europe. This will decrease with time, down to 17% in 2050, and the population of other regions of the world will take the lead.

For the years to come, it gives Europe the specificity of being a kind of laboratory regarding what happens in society and economy, hence in consumption and media habits, when old people are such an essential part of the population. In 2015, Europe hosted almost 27 million people 80 and over, that are currently called in the European Union (EU) publications “elderly people.” This is partly due to the increase in life expectancy which was in 2016, at the age of 80, of 9,5 years as an average. People aged 80 in EU have the longest life expectancy in France (11 years) [2]. This makes France a specific field of experience within the European case.

Focusing on European and French elderly, especially people of 65 and over, the EU statistics released in September 2017 [3] show that French elderly are massively less economically active (5%) from 65 to 74 than the other European (9,5%) which is due to the French state mandatory retirement pension system. In France, working people subscribe to the state pension, compulsory supplementary pensions and voluntary private pensions. This explains the low rate of working people after 65 and the fact that their income is quite good. Even if French elderly are not economically active, that is to say they don’t have a job, they, however, have enough money and are in good shape and health.

The other specificity of France, regarding the elderly, is the public system of health insurance which gives a universal coverage. People add private health insurance, provided by employment-based mutual associations, which covers balance billing and vision and dental care. In 2010, The French health care system was ranked amongst the best by the World Health Organization for its overall efficiency [4]. Even if this ranking can be criticized [5], the French public investment in the health care system, for decades, benefits now to the older part of the population. This is not without social or geographical inequalities: some people cannot afford some specific cares that need extra-billing, and the country meets the problem of “so-called medical deserts” [6]. At the same time, the system has to take care of more and more elderly and must find a way to provide “long-term care to preserve the autonomy of elderly individuals and facilitate ageing at home while reducing the financial and care burden for the families” [6].

The same EU statistics web tool untitled “a look at the lives of the elderly in the EU today” updated in September 2017 [3] also gives elements about European elderly life habits that can be linked to consuming and media habits. In this respect, French elderly tend to live more alone (37,5%) than in the rest of UE (31,2%), and that implies that they already need or will need home care services and home adaptations in order to stay safely alone at home. They also tend to travel more than the average European elderly (EU average is 48,8%, and French average is 64%) that means a specific field of consumption and a big market regarding leisure and travel. Eventually, the statistics release focuses on Internet use in the slide “use of internet once a week.” It shows that 55% of French elderly go on the web once a week at least when the average for Europe is 45%. The countries with the highest percentages are Nordic countries and UK that also happen to be countries with high percentages of economically active elderly between 65 and 74. We can induce that a longer professional life implies the use of the Internet at work. In the French case, this use cannot be linked to a working need. This is why the elderly French consumption also appears as a life-size test regarding consumption and new media.

This paper intends to question what we could call a paradox, especially flagrant in France, regarding what the French government promotes as the silver economy. In Fact, even if the marketing and communication professionals are aware of the kind of treasure these older generations represent regarding their consumption habits, they act slowly or undercover when it comes to addressing older people.

Focusing on the example of France, we will explore this paradox through a semio-communicational analysis of papers coming from the professional marketing press (on and offline), that will enable us to see how this professional literature is quite talkative about older people as a vast market, stressing the fact that senior and elderly are supposed to master consumption thanks to their extended training that started during the golden years of mass consumption currently called in France “Trente glorieuses” [7]. It means literally the “three glorious decades” and names the period, starting with the post Second World War, of reconstruction immediately followed by a period of prosperity, full employment, social change and constant economic growth. This era, linked to economic globalization, stopped in 1974 with economic crisis due to the first oil price shock. It is known to be the starting point and a great developing period of mass consumption in France. People who were young adults in 1945 and their children were the first to benefit from all kind of every day and technological new products from fridges to cars, television sets to chocolate spread. They were and still are very able to integrate into their daily life new products, new technologies, and new media.

Eventually, we will balance this professional marketing discourses with the rare supply dedicated to senior and elderly that appears slowly on the French market, and the analysis of dedicated websites, social media brand pages or social media senior influencers, mostly women, demonstrate how slowly senior seen as consumers are rising on the French web. We will question how this can be linked to brand communications addressing the main population to overcome the difficulty to reach baby boomers.

2 French Information and Communication Sciences as a Scientific Frame

2.1 French Communication Sciences

The analysis we intend to develop here is based on French Information and Communication Sciences contemporary approaches [8]. We choose this analytical basis firstly because we belong to it and secondly because we believe that these scientific approaches deserve to be better known outside the francophone area. We will more specifically mobilize, in French Communication Sciences, researchers focused on the conceptualization, description or analysis of social discourses as well as media and market discourses [9]. Their purpose is to comprehend how these discursive pieces, in their broadest sense including speech, images and all kind of media products, circulate between different social and media spaces thus building their media and public exposure. In this respect, media, commercial, advertising and brand speeches are considered as social discourses carrying out market mediation processes.

This specific point of view is neither psychological, sociological nor semiotic; the French information and communication sciences enable to build intermediate positions, which rely on previous analysis as the problematization developed by Barthes and Baudrillard about consumption as a social and symbolic system, basically a system of signification, linked to a sociological system of distinction, although determined by economic aspects [10,11,12,13].

In this respect, our methodology is specifically designed to deal with signs and meanings linked to consumption items and speeches in a specific sociological, economic, cultural and communication background.

The present paper is based on researches conducted in the long run that give equal weight to the communication process, the communication products (commercials, brand movies, museums, websites, social networks, and so on) and what professional people (advertising, communication and media people) publicly write or say about them. This implies to work on openly commented uses to reach practices and thus find a way towards uses, representations, and users creative appropriations. This is different from reception studies as developed in media studies because it does not stick to media uses even if some of the receiver perspectives are taken in charge. We choose a socio-semiotic based approach dealing both with the negotiation of meaning in the process of interpretation, the ongoing related infinite semiosis, and creative appropriation, or “poaching” as described by De Certeau [14].

2.2 A Sociosemiotic-Based Method: Socio-Semio-Communication Analysis

This way of doing things takes in charge what people think, say, do, especially advertising and marketing professionals, and compares it with what is happening in fact. This point of view implies what we call “creative methodology” in research. We have to find each time the proper set of methods to question it, theoretically, in a proper way. Using already existing methods is usually the mainstream, but some research topics and objects need dedicated crafted methods resulting from a thorough theoretical analysis. Then, it is a major stake to choose the best set and architecture of qualitative methods, not based on statistics or not able to give quantitative results, to question a research topic, in a proper theoretical way.

In this respect, microscale approaches are our choice especially and paradoxically to reach macro analysis. Many very detailed analysis on small elements, which in the end lead to deal with the different big corpus of small things, result in precious and unexpected results we would not have reached through direct macro analysis. Our theoretical position regarding methodology is one of a socio-semio-communication approach.

3 Senior, Silver, etc.: An Excellent Target for the Marketing Field

3.1 Marketing and Publishing: How to Advertise a Service

For some years now, the professional marketing sphere, either French or willing to reach French market, states globally that elderly is the next biggest market to come, especially in France. This is important, since the advertising and marketing people, especially consultants or heads of agencies, usually have a significant publishing activity in books, professional press or blogs, and other social media. This is a regular professional process that ensures the visibility of the author in his or her professional field and, at the same times, acts as a large advertising booklet for his or her practice or company. We can quote, as a good example, the case of Jean-Marie Dru, Chairman of TBWA Worldwide, who coined the word disruption to name his advertising method that is described as “a catalyst for creative thinking and ideas that changes the marketplace, creating business building for brands, companies and industries by upturning and challenging the conventions of that business and finding room to grow in the market” [15]. As a matter of fact, this can describe any work in any marketing or advertising agency, but the publishing work of Dru transformed the definition of disruption in a proprietary procedure through 6 books between 1998 and 2016 [16].

Hence, when a theme appears regularly in papers and books written by marketing professionals, one can think that it is both because some agencies try to grasp the lead and because the theme has, in some respect, a true consistency.

3.2 Senior in French Marketing Discourses: A Twenty Years Story

For more than twenty years now, the topic has been a consistent theme in French publications specialized in marketing. On this matter, one of the best sellers, published for the first time in 1994 and four-time reissued, is “Le senior marketing” [17]. The author was and still is an advertising consultant. He created in the late 90’s an agency dedicated to “senior marketing” called Senioragency. This book started a kind of interest among French marketing people, and some other books came after, dealing more specifically with women senior, generations, etc. This publications prove a real stability of the interest for the older generation even if results remained quite elusive as the years go by.

Later, the French government, willing to boost this market created and started to promote the “Silver économie” sector [13, 18]. In 2013, the French Ministry of Economy and Finance created, as a promising niche, and defined the “Silver Economy” on an acknowledgement of the fact that for a great number of economic sectors and industries, as “gerotontechnologies”, healthcare products, home equipment and leisure, the ageing of the French population is a growth opportunity. The French government defines “Silver économie” as a group of economic and industrial activities that benefit to senior and enhance their quality of life, even their life expectancy. A set of 49 priority actions was decided in 2013–2015, but the system had difficulty to work, and only half of these actions started, mainly driven by state institutions. In 2016, a new launch occurred. These different steps show at the same time a real will and some difficulties in its implementation. The field covered by the idea of silver economy goes beyond only marketing and reaches all the topics of senior citizenship and wellness. The French administration has developed practical handbook entitled “My life in Silver” and an official AFNOR standard (the French National Standards Association) named “tested and approved by senior” (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1.
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Silver official standard and Silver Economy handbook on www.silvereco.fr

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The same kind of gap exists between the uncontested assertion of one market and even more than one, and the slow development of a true products and services offering, not only regarding retirement or nursing homes which are quite common due to a longer span of life. This is particularly flagrant analyzing in a quite extensive way different corpus of marketing professional writings about senior and elderly markets. We gathered different types of corpuses: one corpus gathered data from Europress database taking into account two full years of three French professional marketing magazines, amongst the most read: Stratégies (mostly about advertising and communication agencies), Marketing Magazine, LSA (mostly about retail), one corpus gathered data from the web archives of CB News, the second most read magazine in the advertising field, and one corpus gathered French and international web documents about French elderly and senior as emerging or growing markets.

3.3 Aging in Marketing Discourses: A New Consumption Target

For marketing people, senior and elderly clearly appear as very promising groups of the population. Therefore, it is necessary to evaluate the potential of this coming and growing source of business and to understand their specific needs, their self-image or self-images and their new media habits [19, 20]. In France, for the first time, two, and sometimes three, generations in the same family can be referred as “senior”, with young senior being 50, their parents 70 or over and their elderly grandparents being 80 to 90 or over. The middle ones (70 or over) being, most of the time, caregivers for their parents or older relatives. Even if, as seen before, the French government and marketing people are aware of the importance as a market of this part of the population they only start to look at people 50 and over as different populations of consumers, especially when it comes to new media habits.

Even if it is common sense to know that people aged 50, 60, 70, 80 or 90 must have different needs, tastes, daily activities and be dramatically different regarding autonomy, these differences almost disappear in marketing discourses. In these analysis, these different ages of life are still often categorized as one, as a whole, especially when it comes to new ways of consumption, new media, and IT products consumption [19, 21, 22]. However, marketing, media, and advertising people mostly concentrate on groups of the population known for their purchasing power and their proven activity in consumption [19, 22, 23]. It used to be marketing common sense to qualify the elderly as small buyers, especially in home equipment and fashion, and, regarding food and everyday supply, set in their ways. In this point of view, the interest to build new market offers was seen as poor. This tends to evolve in general and particularly for marketing professionals [21, 24, 25]. Senior and elderly now appear as possible marketing targets for a whole range of products, services, and media.

3.4 Senior and French Marketing: Statements More Than Achievements

Most of the papers and web publications we gathered shows that marketing professionals are globally aware of the fact that senior people are now a target since they represent, in France, an important part of social, economic, political power. The economic aspect is particularly important in this process as shown in papers as “De l’or, mon senior” (my senior is rich - Marketing), “Les seniors futur relais de croissance pour la grande consommation” (senior as a coming source of growth for mass consumption - LSA), “Fiers d’être jeunior” (Proud to be young senior – Stratégies), “Les “jeunes vieux” au pouvoir” (Power to young old people– Stratégies). The senior and elderly consumption practices and habits are also explored as new possible markets or communication tools. In this respect CB-News particularly focuses on digital aspects with papers about “on-line senior”, “silver surfers”, “how elderly are quick to pass along fake news”. Senior shopping habits are also analyzed: what they buy, how they spend time and money in malls, how women senior are particularly active in consumption on and off-line. Some papers also concentrate on the presentation of new products, media or services dedicated to senior or/and elderly. Two launches are particularly present in the professional discourses gathered:

  1. 1.

    The opening of a new kind of shop called “Bien chez moi” (I feel good at home) opened by the big French retail group Les Mousquetaires also the owner or the Intermarché super and hypermarket brand ranked as the third French retail group,

  2. 2.

    The launch of a women’s magazine dedicated to senior untitled “Femme Actuelle Senior.” The launch has been both on and offline, with social media accounts and a newsletter.

4 Small Starts: New Retail, New Media

Hopefully, these two launches are not the first one in France, but we can say that they seem to be the first ones openly launched as designed for young senior and advertising themselves as such.

4.1 “Bien Chez Moi” (I Feel Good at Home): A Sustainable Model?

As already seen, “Bien chez moi” is the first store of its kind launched by a major French retail group. The store opened October 3rd, 2018 in Flers, a small town in Normandie region. The store is located in a shopping center built around an Intermarché hypermarket, which is also a brand part of Les Mousquetaires group. According to the brand manager, Flers has been chosen because of its location, in a regular French town outside Paris and its region, with the idea to promote local stores “concerned with the welfare of elderly” [26]. It has been presented as a test store implying that the group may think about a national cover or specific elderly dedicated section in its supermarket and hypermarket chain Intermarché.

Indeed, this store is the result of an ongoing and significant concern for senior consumers shown by the retail group. We can even say that Les Mousquetaires has worked on the subject with small steps before reaching the possibility to open a dedicated store. In the past years, Intermarché stores have progressively sold and put forward in their weekly promotion advertising catalogs, assisted living products in between basic daily products, these small products linked to assisted living were completely mingled with all kind of promotions. This enabled us to assume that it was part of a global strategy to standardize and normalize products related to aging and/or assisted living since they appear as mass consumption products: “In this respect, the fact that an object or service becomes a good, its commodification, acts as a sign of its normalization since there is no need to go in a specialized or dedicated to professionals store” [13]. Whenever you start to find senior dedicated products in your supermarket, it delivers you the message that these products are standard and that it is normal to need and buy them (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2.
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Intermarché hypermarket advertising catalog

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The “Bien Chez moi” store has a website and a Facebook page gathering very few followers in January 2019, three months after the opening. The website has a simple, flat design with a black background and a jigsaw puzzle like the presentation of four sections dedicated to wellness, being connected (tablets, computers, and smartphones), home equipment and how to open your mind. In each section, a set of subsections are proposed with specific products. Globally, the products mingle regular products such as Dead Sea Mud enriched cosmetics, and soaps or aromatherapy, Pilates and yoga books and accessories and senior dedicated products like posture correcting undergarment designed like sports outfit, devices and security solutions for the bathroom. The connected life section is dedicated to connected home appliances for safety, easy to use phones and tablets and devices to monitor health. Photographs show a store where the exhibition areas seem to be a mix of an organic store or Nature House shope, an Ikea staging and a small bookshop. The place appears to be vast and not so crowded with merchandise. The scarcity of the supply is not, in fact, a choice from the retail group since they issued last month an official appeal [27] to find new products and French industries to develop and produce senior dedicated products (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3.
figure 3

Intermarché Bien Chez Moi website

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4.2 “Femme Actuelle Senior”: New Media, New Discourses?

Femme Actuelle Senior (Senior Contemporary Woman) has been launched in April 2018, both offline and online. The magazine existed previously, since 2015, under the named Serengo. This previous version did not reach success, and Prisma Press Group decided to take advantage of the success of Femme Actuelle (Contemporary Woman), its flagship, which is the most widely read women French magazine.

At first sight, Femme Actuelle Senior, seems quite similar to other magazines, off and online, dedicated in France to senior as Pleine Vie (Living Fully) and Notre Temps (Nowadays). Pleine Vie and Notre temps give a great place to consumption topic, linking senior fulfillment with consumption. They advise about the best ways to consume, so does Femme Actuelle Senior. The section on Femme Actuelle Senior website dedicated to consumption is named “smart consumption” and announces: “we have only one obsession: save you some cash.” The idea is not only about having a nice life thanks to consumption, it is to be happy because you master consumption and you don’t spend more than needed. This section gathers a mix, without apparent ranking, of papers about regular topics (taxes, sales period, how to get rid of humidity at home, home to save power and money with your washing machine,…) and senior topics (retirement pension, survivor’s pension, a donation between spouses). The huge discrepancy in the mix makes it difficult to follow.

The section named Smart web is dedicated to: “Finding for you the good ideas on the web and give you tips to surf the web better”. This implies that the readers already use IT and are even used to it since they can improve their uses. The papers in this section are mostly small instructions manual, explaining how to use bluetooth, what are challenges on social media, how to recover the deleted content of a computer trash box, finding some specific websites, how to avoid credit card scam, etc. Only one paper is dedicated to the presentation of a tablet “simplified for seniors” which happens to be the prize to be won in a contest organized by the magazine.

The magazine both online and offline makes the difference with Notre Temps and Pleine Vie when it comes to sex life issues since it appears, in Femme Actuelle Senior as a regular topic in many papers, both on the website and in the magazine. It appears as a mandatory theme to write about as it is usually in women magazine. However, all the taboos are not overcome, and globally women and men represented in Femme Actuelle Senior fit the stereotype of the young senior that tends to appear in media in commercials. Advertising is particularly efficient in its work of stereotypy, choosing carefully nice looking even beautiful young senior people, very dynamic, beautifully tanned, hair magnificent gray or white, doing easily physically and intellectually demanding activities [12, 21, 25, 28]. Being senior is less about aging that about staying young. In this respect, the similarity between representations in advertising and Femme Actuelle Senior is flagrant (Figs. 4 and 5).

Fig. 4.
figure 4

Femme Actuelle Senior website

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Fig. 5.
figure 5

Young senior stereotypy in mass advertising

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5 Conclusion: Senior and Dedicated Products and Media, True Needs and Circumventing Discourses

The example of the French market experience regarding senior and elderly dedicated offer shows that a longtime interest and acknowledgment of the strength of a part of the population as a marketing target is not enough, even sustained by state action, to start a massive move in industries and companies offer as well as in older people purchases. The problem encountered by Les Mousquetaires group in order to find genuinely adapted, both technically and symbolically, items to sell in Bien chez moi, their first store dedicated to senior, is typical.

Even when the supply does exist, “young” senior or baby boomers are particularly difficult to reach with “old person” stamped products. They are the golden generation, even if the French state promotes “silver,” regarding consumption. In France, they have grown up and evolved in adulthood with mass consumption and constant technological changes. They are skilled enough with IT devices. Even if they are well aware of aging issues, since many of them are caregivers for their elderly parents or relatives, they want adaptation without old persons dedicated obvious design and commercial discourses.

In this respect, the failure of attempts to launch specifically dedicated offers such as Serengo (now Femme Actuelle Senior) or the website “Vivre l’accessibilité en toute liberté” (To live accessibility in complete freedom) by Lapeyre (home improvement stores) is emblematic of the phenomenon. Once linked to the regular best seller Femme Actuelle, Femme Actuelle Senior is a media success. At the same time, the repositioning of Lapeyre senior dedicated products and personalized advice in the regular, general public, offer, presented on its website and consumer magazines has been the solution.

In this respect, taking senior as one group is not possible any more especially in the IT and new media consumption. When elderly need help, adapted and simplified devices, discovery and training workshop, baby boomers are already fluent with computers, tables, and smartphone, they master mail and well enough blogs and social media. They need tips to keep up with evolutions especially the ones linked to their grandchildren. Baby boomers want to be taken as regular consumers.