Book Review: Brent Green's "Marketing to Leading-Edge Baby Boomers"

Business books can be great reads, even if the subject matter is not applicable to your career or business. It is often just interesting seeing how a particular industry works or why a particular company or executive is successful. In "Marketing to Leading-Edge Baby Boomers" author Brent Green has a new book that goes beyond executives, companies, and industries, and tackles an entire generation.

At a time that boomer demographics are requiring that companies rethink their core markets, for example insurance companies repositioning themselves from companies that protect people from dying too young to companies that protect people from living too long ("longevity risk"), the book couldn't be more topical.

For companies, such as LifeTwo, for whom understanding the baby boomer market is paramount, this book is an outstanding guide. But that will represent a smaller market for this book than the much greater number of people who are simply interested in understanding why things are the way they are.

As for the specific subject matter, by now pretty much everyone knows that baby boomers control the majority of wealth in the country and exert disproportionate influence on almost every segment of our lives. These statistics are quoted so often that they have become cliché (and watch for the coming backlash from every other generation wondering when they will finally be out of shadow of self-absorbing boomers.) But knowing statistics about boomers is different than understanding what makes them tick or how to market to them--the focus of this book.

In addition to covering the past and present, the book outlines predictions for the world we will be inhabiting 20 years from now, which many readers will find the most interesting and probably serves as the basis for a follow-up book. Like death and taxes, the march of time is inescapable.

Disclosure: LifeTwo is using Green's book in our own marketing efforts.

Addendum: Much, though not all, of LifeTwo's target market are baby boomers and in an effort to provide well-rounded boomer information we created a blog carnival (BloggingBoomes) to make it easy for readers to access other blogs covering boomer-related issues.