Much is being written these days about marketing to seniors. No less an authority than Seth Godin urges marketers to cozy up to the senior set. Now that I am a Silver Surfer, I have but one question -

Is anybody under the age of 50 paying attention?

It seems to me the simplest, most elementary technique to employ when marketing to seniors is to use large fonts. Our eyes ain’t working so well, folks. So quite understandably, the last thing I expected when I ordered my first shipment of Flexicose was a problem on the font front.

For those of you who are still hip as opposed to waiting for a hip replacement, Flexicose is an OTC medication used to ease joint pain.

Flexicose is marketed to creaky old codgers with arthritis, and banged up jock fossils like me with bad knees and eyes to match. The container, as you can see, is pretty tricky. When I consulted the instructions on the back, here’s what I saw -

Yeah, you’re seeing it just the way I did. Pretty helpful, huh? I suppose I could have gotten my reading glasses or referred to the Flexicose Web site, but I’m old and impatient and confused. So I just guessed at the dosage and discovered a few days later I had been doubling up. Hope there’s no side effects.

But deciphering the Flexicose bottle was a piece of cake compared to the challenge posed by another new fangled product I tried recently, an Arbonne hair care item. When my daughter started selling Arbonne – very good products, by the way – I wanted to participate, so I ordered a tube of some cream that’s supposed to stimulate hair growth. What did I have to lose? So I find myself in the shower with this stuff, realizing I have no idea how to use it, how much to put on, how long to keep it on, et cetera. To my panicky eyes, the instructions on the tube looked EXACTLY like this -

Hello, Marketing Department! Who do you think is going to use a hair restoration product? Twenty-eight year-old Air Force fighter pilots? Olympic archers? NO! Your target demographic is old people who don’t wear reading glasses in the shower.

Overlooking the Obvious Cancels Out the Brilliant
It amazes me that products specifically aimed at seniors are packaged in a way that appeals to anyone but a senior. Again, this is elementary stuff. DTC Health, makers of Flexicose, is an impressive organization with first class products. Arbonne is an enormous worldwide company with one of the most sophisticated marketing organizations around. But even outstanding companies like these blacken their eyes when they strain ours.