Happy senior couple on the bench
(Cedit: Getty Images)

WASHINGTON, DC — Senior living providers looking to entice tomorrow’s residents should forget about John Wayne and Bing Crosby and think about Pink and Madonna instead.

That’s according to a panel of senior living experts who addressed differences between today’s Silent Generation resident and tomorrow’s baby boomer consumer during a Thursday discussion at the 2022 National Investment Center for Seniors Housing & Care Fall Conference.

Understanding the market

Senior housing communities live and die by their local market areas, according to NIC MAP Vision CEO Arrick Morton. It’s imperative, he added, for operators to understand not only who is in that market, but who is a potential customer.

One of the biggest mistakes operators make — especially operators that have multiple buildings — is that they replicate a prototype and make everything identical, Morton said. But an opportunity exists to find out what the local market / local residents want and then design spaces and programming to deliver more individualized and engaged experiences. 

Spectrum Retirement Communities Senior Vice President of Marketing and Sales William Swearingen pointed to bingo as an example of senior living creating programming based on outdated beliefs about older adults.

“No one living in your community played bingo before they moved in,” Swearingen said. “They are playing it now because it’s the best thing your program is providing.”

Swearingen pointed to a 2010 study by Stanford University that showed that aging adults had defined themselves by age 40. Nothing on a senior living community calendar is connected to when current residents were in their 40s — which was in the 1970s and 1980s.

“We are still pigeonholing people,” he said. 

Swearingen said he recently turned 59,making him an over-55 consumer. 

“When I think about the Stanford study, my world will not be defined differently when I’m 70 and 80,” he said. “You better be playing Pink and the occasional Madonna. I don’t care about John Wayne and Bing Crosby — all that stuff, that was my grandparents.

Baby boomers

In a CEO roundtable session earlier in the day, Brandywine Living President and CEO Brenda Bacon said that today’s customer comes from a culture of service and modesty. The oldest baby boomers, on the other hand, live in a world of want rather than need. They want to have choices and like being indulged. 

“It’s a whole different set of services and language that goes into talking to baby boomers,” Bacon said. 

Maplewood Senior Living CEO Gregory Smith, also on the CEO panel, said that the profile of the senior living consumer has been somewhat static for many years. But the oldest boomers are shifting expectations and demands.

“If we don’t wake up, we’re leaving a lot of revenue on the table, because this is an easy thing to fix.”

Service differentiation, he said, costs nothing. 

Bild & Co. Chief Visionary Officer Traci Bild said that it takes effort to step outside of a comfort zone. The Silent Generation, she said, was very accommodating, respectful and did not complain. The oldest baby boomers, on the other hand, will stomp their feet, complain and stick their lips out if they don’t see what they want.

“They are going to stay home unless they see the value,” she said. 

One of the keys to marketing to baby boomers is to show what life is like in a community, Swearingen said. Perfect images of empty billiards and dining rooms don’t show life.

“We get too wrapped up in real estate,” Swearingen said. “We built it and want to celebrate it. That’s not life.”

Brookdale Senior Living President and CEO Cindy Baier, who served on the CEO panel, said that the consumer of tomorrow grew up with Amazon, the internet and artificial intelligence making recommendations for them.

“We really have to step up our game as it relates to technology and what’s available in our communities,” Baier said. “Personalization is so important.”

The buyer experience

One thing operators can do without spending any money is to change the buyer experience, speakers said.

Baby boomers, Bild said, like attention. When boomers are coming in to visit their parents, ask them what they want. They will respond, she said.

“When you make people feel heard, seen, wanted, valued; if staff are trained at that level of emotional intelligence, that will attract more boomers,” she said. “Through the buyer experience, start to transform their perception and level of excitement, and get them to realize maybe the grass is greener over here.”

Diversity

When thinking about expanding market share, Swearingen said it’s important to step back and look at diversity in both the resident and staff populations. 

Senior living today, Swearingen said, is predominantly a white resident population served by minority staff members. Tomorrow’s consumers are more ethnically diverse, he said.

Growing populations have economic buying power, Swearingen said. Using the LGBTQ population as an example, he said that it’s a population that senior living ignores.

“There has to be an intentional effort to look at these populations, how they search for senior living, what they’re looking for, and create opportunities,” Swearingen said, adding that that effort should cross over into staff recruitment. 

Bild said that if the industry is going to court those populations and diversify, it needs to be prepared to diversify other aspects of senior living, including culinary and lifestyle offerings. That diversification involves communicating with and understanding those populations, conducting outreach and starting to build their trust in senior housing.

“You have to set personal ideologies aside. Personal ideologies don’t have a place in what we are responsible for delivering to the seniors of this country,” Swearingen said. “Everybody ages, and everybody deserves what we provide.”

Bild said that the industry has time before the oldest boomers, who are turning 76 this year, start moving into senior living communities en masse. She encouraged operators to take the next 12 months to learn as much as possible about the oldest boomers (the youngest boomers are turning 58 this year and are closer to Generation X), look at trends, decide what is doable, and develop short- and long-term goals.

Additional coverage of the conference appears in the Related Articles box below.

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