It isn’t just products aimed specifically at the old that the elderly are snapping up on the internet. Their online spending on booze nearly quadrupled in America, estimates NielsenIQ. SilverSingles, a dating website, reports healthy growth in the number of new monthly users. Virtual first dates featuring wine tasting, food deliveries and film streaming are all the rage, affording brands the chance to offer their wares to oldies who have signed up.
Brands are also attempting to appeal to the elderly through such things as “healthy ageing” products, which the pandemic has turned into a craze. Nestlé, a Swiss consumer-goods giant, has launched a milk drink in China, which supposedly aids mobility. Reckitt Benckiser, a British rival, is marketing one that targets immunity. Danone, a French yogurt-maker, is investing in developing similar products. Companies are also thinking about spending more on wrinkle-friendly adverts; just 3% of America’s ad spending is aimed at people over 50, reckons Joseph Coughlin, who runs the AgeLab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Some innovations welcome in a pandemic may be less so once it passes, especially for retailers. Maintaining priority slots for online deliveries to the elderly, and not charging them a delivery fee on what tend to be small orders ferried at a loss, is going to be costly, warns one supermarket boss. Yet companies will face pressure to keep them to retain custom, especially with ever more physical shops shut for good.
They may also need to make online shopping easier than it already is. That could mean fewer forms that the elderly (and everyone else) find fiddly, and more options as to how and when to pay, to reassure older shoppers who worry about sharing credit-card details. Having taught oldies some new tricks during the pandemic, firms must now learn a few themselves. ■