MATURE MARKET HEADLINES updated 11/10/99
MetLife Creates Mature Market Guide
According to the MetLife Mature Market Institute, people over age 50 represent a vast, growing, and affluent group of consumers. Seventy percent of all financial assets are held by this mature market. While this trend represents an enormous opportunity for American business, not all will profit because it takes special knowledge and skills to reach this sophisticated group of consumers.
"Forging relationships is essential in business", says Dr. Sandra Timmermann, MetLife's Mature Market director. "The best way to develop a meaningful relationship is to understand the people with whom we do business." In response to the needs of the nation's mature market MetLife has created a guidebook titled "The Mature Market: Guidelines for Effective Communication" intended for those who wish to do business with older Americans.
"Our booklet offers help to those who market to and interact with older customers. It presents a perspective on how elders view themselves and how we can communicate with them for the most effective results." Readers will find a treasure trove of highly practical advice. Here's a sample list.
- How to portray the image of older adults.
- Key words to avoid in advertisement text.
- How to improve readability of your message.
- Tips for face-to-face communication.
- Making your business environment user-friendly.
The guide, available free-of-charge to individuals and organizations, also advises marketers that older adults are more independent decision-makers than their younger counterparts and less responsive to embellished claims and sales pitches.
The Mature Market Institute is MetLife's comprehensive resource center for issues concerning the mature market. The Institute, staffed by gerontologists (specialists in aging), provides training and education, consultation and information to support MetLife. To receive a free copy of the guidebook, write to the MetLife Mature Market Institute, 57 Greens Farms Road, Westport, CT 06880 or call (203) 221-6580.
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Boomers Facing Financial Disaster
Baby Boomers are "woefully uninformed" about long term care, and they fail to understand how vulnerable they are when it comes to long term care costs, so says Dr. Fernando M. Torres-Gil in support of a new study released by the American Health Care Association.
"We need to provide a social safety net that ensures some measure of protection for Boomers in their golden years," said Torres-Gil. "As part of ensuring security for seniors, we must also be vigilant about preserving existing, though limited, Medicare benefits for skilled nursing care. Those benefits have been cut dramatically, and the cuts are hurting seniors today."
"We're causing immediate problems by eroding the basic benefits of Medicare in the short-term. And in the long-term, we need to find a better solution to pay for seniors' and aging Boomers' long term care needs," Dr. Torres-Gil explains. "Boomers are completely confused about how health care-specifically long term care-is paid for in retirement," says Tony Fabrizio, partner of Fabrizio, McLaughlin & Associates, one of two firms collaborating on this study commissioned by the American Health Care Association. "At this rate, Americans will be forced into destitution if they need long term care at some point in their lives."
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Sleep Loss Harms Metabolic Functions
"The state of sleep debt has a harmful impact on carbohydrate metabolism and endocrine function," write Karine Spiegel, PhD, and colleagues at the Department of Medicine, University of Chicago.
The scientists found that sleep debt can alter metabolic and hormonal functions. These effects are commonly seen as part of the normal aging process, and persistent sleep debt may, therefore, increase the severity of age-related chronic disorders.
During this century, the average number of hours that people spend asleep per night in more-developed countries has decreased from nine hours to 7.5 hours. The change has been made to accommodate increased demands of work, with around-the-clock production, shift work, etc, as well as more leisure activities.
The consensus is that sleep is beneficial for the brain but not for the rest of the body. There have been reports that the number of hours asleep each night can be voluntarily decreased without affecting daytime sleepiness, mood, or cognitive function.
The research was supported by a grant from the Research Network on
Mind-Body Interactions of the MacArthur Foundation, by a grant from the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and by grants from the National Institutes of Health.
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Age-related Decline in Mental Function
When young adults are asked to remember a list of words, then switch tasks and do a math problem, they use areas in the front of the brain and towards the back of both hemispheres - the visual cortices.
However, says University of Michigan researcher, Dr. Anat Geva, when older adults perform the same pair of concurrent tasks, they are more likely than young adults to use an area on the left front side of the brain. "Several studies have shown that older people have more difficulty than younger people at switching tasks," says Geva. "But the underlying reasons for this difficulty have remained unclear.
In general, researchers found that older subjects were less accurate and slower than younger subjects on both math and verbal tasks. "Even though older and younger subjects in general seem to use different regions of the brain to carry out the same types of tasks, knowing someone's age doesn't tell you everything about their performance and how their brain works," says Geva.
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Older Consumers Cautioned on Melatonin
"Wake up refreshed and full of energy," says one advertisement for melatonin. Other ads promote use of the compound for a host of health problems from obesity to insomnia. Many advertisements target older people and encourage them to take commercial melatonin preparations to restore levels lost with aging. Older Americans who do, however, have responded to a false premise in the salesman's cry, according to results of a new study that contradicts the popular notion that melatonin levels in older people fall with age.
In the study, National Institutes of Health (NIH) grantee Charles A. Czeisler, M.D., Ph.D. and colleagues at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston studied 34 healthy older people, both men and women ranging in age from 65 to 81, and found that their nighttime melatonin levels did not differ significantly from those of 98 younger men whose age ranged from 18 to 30.
“The idea that a pineal aging clock winds down as you get older is simply not true,” says Jamie M. Zeitzer, Ph.D. “Being older does not cause a person to have low melatonin levels. While we know that some older individuals have low melatonin levels, it isn't because of their age per se.”
This study was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The NIH is the leading Federal biomedical and behavioral research agency.
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