Ensure, the nutrition drink featured in so many old age joke punch lines, is launching a new line for – you guessed it – baby boomers!
Companies just can’t leave us alone, can they? They look at our demographic of 70+million potential customers and just drool. They’re betting we’ll be a cash cow till the day we die…and we’re sure someone out there already has plans on the drawing board for baby boomer funeral plans.
Abbott, the company which makes Ensure, claims its intentions are strictly honorable; they are merely “responding to the growing needs of America’s aging baby boomer population.” So they’ve come up with a couple of new shakes designed just for us.
Good luck with that! The first problem is they didn’t come up with a new name for these shakes. Boomers, who loathe any label that hints of aging, aren’t going to be caught dead in the supermarket checkout with a case of Ensure. Didn’t Abbott’s marketing geniuses pick up on this when they noticed all the senior centers changing their names to things like “prime time” and “active adult” center???
You want to sell a nutrition drink to boomers, you better give it a snazzy name like Kick Ass or Hard Core.
Or at least come up with a cocktail in which you drop a shot of Jagermeister into a glass of your new shake…actually, scratch that thought…we just can’t picture folks lining up at the bar for Ensurebombs.
I agree, pick a new name. I would suggest new flavors too. I think they should call it something like Life2 or Reboot . Call it an energy drink . There is a product called Boost that is marketed to those of all ages as a meal replacer. I say take there angle and have Ben and Jerry do the flavors. Put it in a glass bottle. Sell it near the snacks and ice cream. Then have them open a chain of malt shops (remember the 5 and 10) with large sections of boomer stuff for sale (cloths, music, books). A boomer loves destinations like Hard Rock Cafe or Six Flags .
The big thing is for ads to be about the future, not the past. I am a Gen Xer but I do get how you feel. You want to feel vital till the very end . I say my Gen stands to make some good money helping you live your dream.