Trendspotting: Not the Retiring Kind
For many middle-income Americans, the golden years will be less about sitting by the pool in Boca Raton and more about getting progress reports in on time. With upwards of half of Americans saying that they don’t know if they will have enough savings to retire, it’s no surprise that 30 percent of middle-class Americans [...]
Trendspotting: On the Chin
Whether tightening the turkey neck or making the most of a weak chin, chin augmentations are quickly growing in popularity, leaving breast implants, liposuction and Botox in the dust. Between 2010 and 2011, there was a 71 percent increase in “chinplants”—thanks to the flood of aging baby boomers, more competition in the workplace (90 percent [...]
Trendspotting: Time Off
Baby boomers confront a torrent of negative retirement news. For starters, three in five retirees will outlive their financial assets if they keep up their pre-retirement standard of living, and the average 65-year-old couple will face more than $250,000 in out-of-pocket healthcare costs over the remainder of their lives. In Canada, those over the age [...]
Trendspotting: Getting Better
In her 2010 book I Remember Nothing, Nora Ephron asserted that older is wiser and more enlightened—a message that resonates powerfully today, even though the late Ephron would have argued that older certainly isn’t prettier or without its indignities. (American Apparel’s ad campaign featuring a beautiful, bespectacled “woman of a certain age” seems to defy [...]
Trendspotting: Aged to Perfection
Not content to merely follow the conventional anti-aging advice about lavishing sunscreen, eating well and exercising, consumers perpetually have their ears—and their wallets—open to the latest, greatest anti-aging product. Women’s expenditures on luxury beauty products actually swell during economic recessions, which psychologists say puts them in overdrive in the search for a mate. And might [...]
Trendspotting: The Parent Trap
Understandably, the 450 million baby boomers in the world want to age in place and to stay independent for as long as possible. That’s why contractors are booked solid retrofitting homes, urban planners are debating how best to adapt whole communities, and home-healthcare product makers are profiting wildly. By 2015, the home-healthcare market is expected [...]
Trendspotting: The Age of Aging
By 2050, 2 billion of us (about 22 percent) will be aged 60 or older—a figure that will have doubled since 2000. In anticipation of our rapidly changing demographics, leaders and physicians worldwide are encouraging an age-friendly age in which seniors are better valued for their contributions, fiscally and otherwise. Of top importance: keeping seniors [...]
Trendspotting: Gonna Make You Sweat
If you think the fitness video retired along with Jane Fonda’s hot pink leg warmers, you’d be wrong. The videos are enjoying renewed popularity, as is 74-year-old Fonda, revisiting her fitness-instructor persona by releasing a series of new workout DVDs targeted to baby boomers. Lean times are credited with ushering in the new wave of [...]
Trendspotting: The Paper Trail
Might résumés be going the way of college applications—all digital and no longer printed out on paper heavy with hope? Yes and no. Though some companies are asking for links to a candidate’s Web presence in lieu of a résumé while others are requiring candidates complete online quizzes or challenges, most still anticipate the résumé [...]
Trendspotting: Spoiled and Unemployed
If you’re in your 20s (or were born between 1980 and 1994), you may want to sit down for this. As much as Gen Y’s elders are trying to get a handle on the often puzzling motivations of the younger group, corporate America still doesn’t hold a terribly high opinion of these millennials, dubbing them [...]
Ten Trends of 20-Somethings
Originally posted on the Huffington Post. With the inaugural One Young World summit kicking off this week in London (my company, Euro RSCG Worldwide, organized it), my thoughts have been focused on the biggest trends among 20-somethings, an increasingly powerful group. In one of my earlier posts, I explained why adults born after 1980 are the [...]
The Power of One Young World
Originally posted on the Huffington Post. Every generation assumes it has been handed the world’s problems because the one that preceded it didn’t quite master the agenda. In the rebellious 1960s, the baby boomers demonstrated noisily against established powers and ideas. But in the case of today’s energetic and engaged twentysomethings—the Real-Time Generation—I think assuming [...]
Generation Real-Time
Originally posted on the Huffington Post. A few years ago I was publicly fretting over the arrival of millennials—young people in the generation after X—in the workplace. I described how these new adults would bring with them a sense of entitlement, a need for constant praise, a habit of multitasking to the point of distraction [...]
How Young People Are Changing the World
Originally posted on the Huffington Post. The opinions of young adults—which today have solidified into values—are not to be ignored. Not only are people in their 20s powerful voices within their communities, but they’re also consumers. These first adults of the millennial generation (roughly, the people born between 1981 and 2000) are bellwethers for a [...]
Portrait of Today’s Boomer
Here’s some of what we know about baby boomers: There are about 78.2 million of them—people born between 1946 and 1964, that is—in the U.S. right now. They account for 26 percent of the population. About 8,000 Americans turn 60 daily. They’ll start turning 65 in 2011. In 2006, there were 37.3 million Americans age [...]
