Where The Bucks Are

Car manufacturers seem equally clueless. "Given that they buy or influence the purchase of 80% of all cars, you would think the entire automotive industry would be focused like a laser beam on women," says Barletta. "But it's not. Every single woman I know can tell you a horror story about having gone into a car dealership."

Tap into a midlife woman's renewed sense of self, and your cash registers are likely to start ringing.

Same thing with consumer electronics, an industry uniquely myopic when it comes to speaking to women. Elissa Geier, 43, a clinical psychologist, is still fuming about her experience buying a laptop at a CompUSA in Chicago. When she tried to ask questions about various models, the sales clerk, a guy in his mid-20s, cut her off: "This is all you need, doc," she remembers him saying dismissively. "I very rarely feel stupid and condescended to, but I found this quite disconcerting," she says. "I'm going to use this computer forever so I don't have to go through the experience of having to buy another."

While some of these issues are problems women of all ages face, in many cases boomer women face an even more insidious hurdle than their younger peers. "Ageism is our society's last acceptable area of bigotry," says Wolfe.

In marketing, at least, there are long-standing philosophical reasons for this bias. It has been a dearly held article of faith in the industry that if you hook a consumer when he or she is young, you'll have a customer for life. Axiomatically, then, mature consumers must be locked into brands they first met decades ago, even though recent research by RoperASW says that older consumers are as likely to switch brands as their children. Second, and more simply, most advertising copywriters are young and male. And let's face it: Demi Moore aside, to most young guys, the idea of a middle-aged woman is just, well, not sexy.

"Tell young men you're targeting your automotive ads to women over 45, and you're likely to get a response like, 'Okay, so we're marketing to middle-aged women, right? Got it. So we want to put a decrepit old crone in front of the car, and we're going to talk about safety, safety, safety,' " says Barletta, laughing. "Forget that the woman is saying, 'I want a car for me now that the kids are out of here!' "

That sentiment embodies the single most powerful approach to this market: Tap into a midlife woman's renewed sense of self, and your cash registers are likely to start ringing. These women are on the ascendancy in their lives, says Crawford Hollingworth, a director at London's trend-tracking firm Headlightvision, a leader in global research on the over-50 market. "I've seen a reawakening of a consciousness of what it means to be a woman, not in a sexual way, but in enjoying being a woman, and thinking about what they want to get out of their lives," he says. "There are a lot of things these women have put on hold, and now they suddenly have the freedom to do them without feeling guilty that they're not looking after their family or their husband." Marketers who can address those yearnings will find a receptive audience, he says.

Financial-services companies, in the business of following the money, picked up on this trend early. An ad for PaineWebber (now part of UBS AG), for example, featured a picture of two women: one clearly the mother, the other the daughter. The copy read, "You're psyched about the future. You're full of new ideas. You're looking to start a business. You're the one on the right." The one on the right was the older woman.

New Balance sneakers was also prescient in addressing this market. After watching sales to young consumers decline in the late 1980s, CEO Jim Davis turned his attention to the older customer. Having five shoe widths rather than three was a boon to older, flatter feet, but his true breakthrough was in product positioning. One ad several years ago featured a woman of uncertain age jogging down a lane. The text read, "One more woman chasing a sunset. One more woman going a little farther. One more woman simply feeling alive. One less woman relying on someone else." "That last line is right in tune with the soul of the midlife woman," says Wolfe. In an anemic market for athletic shoes, New Balance logged sales of $1.3 billion in 2002, double the $550 million it sold in 1997.

It was a breakthrough for older women when 58-year-old Diane Keaton bravely got naked.

Saga, a British-based services company designed for the over-50 crowd, recently tweaked its positioning to address the many consumers in this age bracket who prefer action-oriented travel over sedentary trips like cruises. "Saga originally was about being old," says Hollingworth. "Now it's about being older. It's a very subtle distinction, but psychologically huge. These people want to go to Machu Picchu and discover things, not just chill out."