This is part of Visa’s Feel Faster campaign so I guess there’s no specific intention to actually reach out to older (wealthier) card users.

The song, “Don’t stop me now” is from the 1979 album by Queen. Again, I suspect this is just a coincidence.

Having said all this, whether by coincidence or by design, the ad is multi-generational and the humorous treatment, music and talent should appeal across age bands.

Sadly, I did not attend CISSE 2013 but one visitor reported an impressive array of innovative and comprehensive set of technologies and solutions on display. Leaving the visitor to wonder whether China could be the place that best respond to the ageing population? It has all the elements: the need, the urgency, the policy, the funding, and the innovation.

Some of the innovations on display:

• Smart phone applications for medication reminding, calendaring and caregiver communication

• Community-based remote patient monitoring solutions (vitals, weight, video conference); some standalone but many that provided call centres for consultation

• Many different shapes and sizes of Win8* touch and Android based mobility solutions

• Wearables (e.g. watches) that track wandering or aid with fall prevention and emergency response

• Real estate companies who were providing assisted living facilities as well as group vacations and other services for elders.

The visitor/writer from Intel was surprised by the international commonality of need among older people. He need not have been.

This is not surprising for anyone who has read our book; Marketing to the ageing consumer. The 25 effects of ageing are complex, relentless and UNIVERSAL.

Many of the vendors claimed deployments in the “thousands”…still a tiny fragment of the Chinese market but significant nonetheless.

I will try to attend next year.

Marketing magazine asks “Will Asia buy Apple’s brand America campaign”. If this campaign is intended for global audiences it is indeed questionable whether this will resonate with Asian consumers, ironic given that its key markets for growth are in Asia, particularly China.

While there is no doubt the principal message of this commercial is aimed at a younger audience, Apple manages to remind us of the age-neutrality of it’s brand around the 42 second mark.

Appropriate and not gratuitous.

It’s worth remembering that according to research by MetaFacts in 2009, 46% of Apple’s customer base are age 55 and older, nearly double the share of average home PC users (25.2%).

Download our free Apple case study here.

The findings, reported here in HealthDay, suggest that older people might make better decisions if they have more time for their brains to process details. For example, it might help to adjust the length of time the older customers get to review and choose different product or service offerings. Furthermore, the researchers concluded that we can help many older adults make higher-quality decisions by presenting the information better.

For this precise reason, cognitive issues are included among the 25 effects of ageing applied to the assement of the customer journey in our AF Audit.

So the theory that older people make less risky — and less sound — decisions, has been proven wrong by this research.

I don’t often write about extreme age issues except, as in this case, the facts are staggering.

According to this article in New Scientist in 1990, researchers estimates 1.8 per cent of Chinese aged 65 to 69, and 42.1 per cent aged 95 to 99, had dementia. In 2010 those figures were 2.6 and 60.5 per cent, respectively. If similar rates hold in other middle-income countries, there might be 20 per cent more cases of Alzheimer’s worldwide – five million more – than now estimated, the authors calculate.

The increase in China might reflect better diagnosis, but an urbanising lifestyle could also be causing more dementia. Obesity, diabetes and suboptimal health contribute.  One expert says that if midlife obesity is a risk factor for dementia, then future rates in China could be 20 per cent higher than estimated.

All the more amazing that car companies still don’t seem to get the importance of age-friendly motoring as illustrated in this episode of Top Gear.

Study also revealed that the number of consumers 35 to 44 with driver’s license fell 6.6% from 2007 to 2011.

In our book, Marketing to the Ageing Consumer, we reference the marketing implications of impaired hand-eye coordination on the age-friendliness of various consumer experiences. Simple acts like dialling a phone, operating a computer mouse or remote control device. Older people might increasingly find they fumble with keys in a lock or knock over the occasional wine glass.

While it’s easy to see these failings as a normal consequence of age-related breakdowns in agility, vision and other physical abilities, this report in Medical News Today cites new research from Washington University in St. Louis suggests that when young people move their hands to pick up an object, they remain aware of and sensitive to potential obstacles along the movement path. Older adults, on the other hand, tend to devote more attention to objects that are closer to their bodies – whether they are on the action path or not.

Knowing more about these ageing-related changes in spatial representation, may eventually inspire a rethink in product and retail design options. There may also be opportunities for skills training and other therapies to help seniors compensate for the cognitive declines that influence hand-eye coordination.

The researchers plotted average inflation levels over the last five years against changes in the dependency ratio, which compares the very old and very young to the working-age population.

The resulting chart showed nations that have aged in recent years typically faced very low inflation and, in the case of Japan, deflation. By contrast, those that have been getting younger, such as India, Turkey and Brazil, have relatively strong price pressures.

As reported in this Bloomberg article, the finding clashes with the view of economics textbooks which tend to say a slowdown in population growth should put upward pressure on wages — and therefore inflation — as labour supply shrinks. Still, this ignores how demographics influence demand for durable goods and property.

A Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis study that says because older generations work less and prefer higher rates of returns on their savings, they are averse to inflation eating away at their assets whereas the young initially don’t have many assets, wages are their main source of income. The young are therefore comfortable with relatively high wages and the resulting inflation.

According to this article in the SCMP, the first major report from this baseline survey will be released today by Peking University in Beijing, however it does not yet seem to be available on their website.

The China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) is a landmark survey of the middle-aged and elderly in China. It aims to measure the existence and impact of these social safety nets at both the household and community levels. It interviewed one person per household aged above 45 and their spouses to track the participants into retirement. The researchers will conduct follow-up study every two years, with the second one scheduled to begin this summer.

Sister surveys, which share key principles and features, are also in Mexico, England, Ireland, Costa Rica, New Zealand, Indonesia, South Korea, India, Thailand, Japan, and Europe (as a 19-country network survey).