Boomer Business Fails On a Fundamental

July 11, 2009 | By Kim Walker

Older consumers are in denial about their age. It’s a fundamental truism that needs to be respected when nmarketing to silver consumers.

Evidence of this is the recent failure of TeeBeeDee.com (a social network aimed at baby boomers) reported here by Reuters.

At it’s launch, the founder said “I recognized that people my age were like our parents and needed an outlet that reflected that. Looking at social networks today, people my age are looking for information, not hanging out, so I saw a need there too.”

But baby boomers apparently did not want to be categorized away by their age. TBD.com had only 70,000 unique visitors last month. Instead, they were quite content with heading over to open social networking sites like Facebook, which has seen its fastest growth in users 55+.

If only they’d asked SILVER, we could have saved them a lot of work and the US$9 million in venture capital to realize this basic flaw in their thinking.