Older Women: How to Dominate This Growing, Affluent Market

Since its launch last week, our report, Older Women: The Forgotten Demographic, has been creating considerable debate amongst beauty professionals.

Something that keeps coming up are questions about the best ways to reach the 50+ market.

So we thought we’d delve deeper into the crucial role that the media could be playing to help beauty brands target the over 50s.

I say could be because, with the help of mymarketmonitor.com, the specialist beauty media insight company, we’ve discovered that editorial opportunities in the magazines and national press that target women over 50 are grossly underexploited.

These include:

• The Mail on Sunday - You Magazine

• The Sunday Times - Style Magazine

• The Sunday Telegraph - Stella Magazine

Remember this is a market worth around £2 billion a year and yet it seems that most beauty companies are not interested in targeting them through PR.

Beauty brands identified by respondents in our survey heavily support these titles with advertising. Yet, you have to search high and low to find any mention of them in the beauty pages themselves.

In particular, Stella Magazine rarely features beauty brands that target the over 50s, yet 66% of the readers of The Sunday Telegraph are aged 50 and over.

And it’s not just the nationals. Key women’s magazines which profess to be supporting the over 50s also fail to feature beauty brands used by this demographic in their editorial.

Good Housekeeping, Women & Home and Saga not only carry little advertising {in fact none for Saga over the review period}, editorial coverage of beauty is also out of kilter with their older readership.

What’s clear is there’s an incredible opportunity for savvy beauty brands to corner these areas of the media.Mike Ramseyer, CEO of mymarketmonitor comments: “It is essential to look at both the print marketing disciplines of PR and advertising. Only 50% of the consumer titles we analysed appear in both the top 20 advertising and PR rankings, so there is in fact little synergy and a great deal of lost opportunity

He stresses: “The advertising media scheduling has to be in synergy with the PR push.

”If beauty brands are really serious about going after the 50 plus age group, they are going to need to tie advertising and PR together more closely. The current lack of synchronicity means they are simply throwing their money away.”

mymarketmonitor data: year ending April 2012