By Crispin Beale and Richard Bell
Every so often, a corporate reversal reveals more about an industry than the strategy it replaces. This spring, Coty acknowledged that its attempt to make CoverGirl “the ultimate Gen Z brand” had not worked and said it would rebuild the brand around Gen X women, the customers retailers had been asking the beauty industry to take more seriously.
The interesting question is not why CoverGirl went back. It is why it ever looked away.
For years, the brand competed aggressively for younger consumers whose future loyalty was uncertain, while treating one of the category’s most valuable audiences as though familiarity would be enough to keep the revenue flowing. This reflects one of modern marketing’s most persistent assumptions: acquire consumers young, build the relationship early, trust that habit will carry them forward, then move them quietly from growth into retention once they cross the upper edge of the traditional brief.
The logic sounds sensible until one remembers that people do not remain the same consumers for forty years. Their circumstances change. Products that once suited them stop doing so. Categories they ignored become relevant, and familiar brands become open to reconsideration.
The customer may have been acquired at 25. But the lifetime relationship was never a guarantee.
The Youth Pipeline Fallacy
There is nothing wrong with pursuing younger consumers. They enter categories for the first time, can influence wider behaviour and may become valuable customers for decades. The mistake is turning one legitimate route to growth into the only route anyone can imagine.
Brands compete intensely for the same younger audiences, often using the same platforms and cultural signals. Those consumers are surrounded by rival offers and given constant reasons to experiment. Attention is fragmented, acquisition is expensive and the eventual return depends upon retaining a customer through decades of change.
Brands may win the transaction. They are often renting the relationship.
Yet as consumers move beyond the traditional 18–49 planning range, the ambition invested in winning them tends to recede. Acquisition becomes CRM. Innovation becomes adaptation, if it continues at all. The objective shifts from creating demand to assuming the revenue will remain.
We call this the Youth Pipeline Fallacy: the belief that customer acquisition is principally a youthful event and that consumers won early can be relied upon to travel through the rest of life largely under their own momentum. The spreadsheet calls it customer lifetime value. The customer has not signed anything.
A Market Hiding in the P&L
The commercial scale of the 50-plus audience is not speculative. Households headed by someone aged 50 or older account for more than half of consumer spending in the United States. Gen X has been the world’s highest-spending generation since 2021 and is expected to retain that position until at least 2033.
Across many consumer categories reviewed by Openly Gray, a strategy and creative consultancy purpose-built for the 50+ demographic, people aged 50 and over account for approximately 35 to 60 per cent of revenue. Yet the deliberate marketing investment aimed at understanding and winning them can range from virtually nothing to around 10 per cent, depending on the category.
These are working category benchmarks, not a claim that every market follows an identical pattern. Each brand must establish its own numbers. But the imbalance raises a question that should interest any CMO, and certainly any CFO: how can an audience generate such a large share of revenue while receiving so little deliberate investment?
The answer is often that nobody is seriously competing for it. The 50-plus audience is not an additional segment waiting outside the category. In many cases, it is already underwriting the category. What remains unclear is whether that revenue has been intentionally earned.
For challenger brands, this can reveal an unusually large first-mover opportunity. For category leaders, it exposes a different possibility: a substantial share of current revenue may rest upon familiarity, availability and the absence of a credible alternative.
Default Advantage Is Not Loyalty
Category leaders are often the greatest beneficiaries of this imbalance. They have strong distribution and accumulated share of voice, with the most visible positions on shelf. Their products are easy to find and their brands come readily to mind. They may collect substantial revenue from older consumers despite having made remarkably little effort to understand or persuade them.
From inside the organisation, this can look like loyalty. It may simply be default advantage.
Habit and availability can produce numbers that resemble a strong customer relationship. The difference becomes apparent only when another brand makes a serious offer. A category leader that has inherited 50-plus revenue without deliberately earning it may be more exposed than its dashboards suggest.
This should make the market attractive to challenger brands. Curiously, many describe themselves as disruptors, then follow every established competitor into the same costly pursuit of youth, fighting for fractional share gains among consumers exposed to more brands and more reasons to switch.
Where are the challengers prepared to compete for an audience that may account for half the category’s revenue while receiving a fraction of its commercial attention?
That is not bravery. It is good business practice, and the arithmetic should make sense to the finance director as readily as it does to the marketer.
Rethinking the Age of Acquisition
Age alone is not a particularly useful way to understand a person. Two people of the same age may differ in health and resources, responsibilities and ideas about what matters. Mindset and circumstances will usually tell us far more than the year printed on a birth certificate.
But that does not make age irrelevant. Age can indicate that circumstances are changing. Mindset helps explain what someone wants from that change. The strategic task is to identify where those forces meet.
We call that an Age of Acquisition: the point at which a category becomes newly relevant, an existing solution stops working or a brand earns permission to begin a relationship. It is not a birthday. It may occur when somebody returns to exercise after years of putting other people first, when greater financial freedom changes what good travel looks like, or when a familiar product no longer meets a higher standard.
The ambition may not be new. What has changed is the customer’s ability, need or willingness to act upon it.
Instead of focusing only on how early a brand can enter someone’s life, organisations should identify when the category becomes open again. What has changed? Why is the old choice no longer automatic? What would make another brand relevant now?
For some categories, the most important acquisition point will occur early in adulthood. For others, it may arrive long after the conventional brief has stopped looking. Customer lifetime value does not begin only once, and it does not continue simply because the brand would find that convenient.
Where Is the Ambition?
When marketers finally consider later life, they often begin with physical decline. Eyesight, mobility and healthcare are commercially important, but they do not describe the whole consumer. People over 50 continue to care about fashion, fitness, music, travel, technology and the pleasure of discovering something worth wanting.
They have not aged out of aspiration. Too many brands have aged them out of the picture.
OXO treated reduced grip strength as a serious design brief and created a kitchen tool that people of almost every age found better. Caddis took the opposite route, building reading glasses unapologetically for a particular life stage and making age part of the brand’s swagger. One created a universal benefit. The other proudly owned the audience. Neither confused age with a reason to lower the ambition.
The same standard should be applied to brands with the resources and permission to do far more. Levi’s has spent generations turning fit into identity. The opportunity is not a “senior” range, nor is it a claim that Levi’s offers nothing suitable today. It is to apply the brand’s authority in denim to changing bodies and expectations without asking customers to exchange style for surrender.
Trek already demonstrates considerable engineering capability through low-step, comfort and electric models, including the Electra Townie range. The unanswered question is why extending the riding life remains largely a product feature or subcategory rather than a confident cultural proposition. A company that helps elite riders go faster can also make lifelong riding feel ambitious and desirable.
Nike has celebrated older athletes before. Its original “Just Do It” campaign featured 80-year-old runner Walt Stack, while later work included 86-year-old triathlete Madonna Buder. That history makes the opportunity more striking, not less. A company built around human potential should be able to turn episodic celebration into a sustained platform across products and services, coaching, communities and experiences for athletes who intend to keep moving for decades.
These examples do not suggest that the brands have done nothing. They show that the capability and permission already exist. What is missing is a deliberate growth strategy equal to the market.
Reach, Conversion and Loyalty
The idea that older consumers are inherently difficult to reach has survived longer than the evidence supporting it. Adults 50-plus are active across social media, streaming, search and ecommerce. Their platform mix differs from that of younger audiences, as the media behaviour of every audience differs. That is a planning question, not a reason to abandon the market.
Nor should anyone claim that every older audience will automatically be cheaper to acquire. The more credible point is that a large, digitally reachable audience often faces far less purposeful competition from brands seeking to win it.
There is evidence that the relationship can become more durable once trust has been earned. Research discussed by Harvard Business School reports brand repurchase rates of 40 per cent among consumers aged 18 to 39, rising to 65 per cent among those aged 60 to 74 and 70 per cent among people over 75. The same work notes that older consumers may take more effort to convert because trust matters.
That is not a contradiction. It may be the commercial advantage.
Younger consumers are routinely invited to experiment. Older consumers may demand a stronger case, but once a brand provides one, the relationship can prove more durable. The first serious entrant into an undercontested market can also establish what good looks like and set the standard later competitors must meet.
Why the Insights Profession Should Lead
The research and insights profession is unusually well placed to expose this opportunity, but only if it challenges the assumptions within the brief rather than simply executing them. When 18–49 is presented as the commercial universe, researchers should ask what happens next. Which needs are changing? When does the category reopen? Is stable buying behaviour evidence of genuine preference, or merely the absence of a serious alternative?
Age should be treated as a source of questions, not as a complete segment reported at the back of a presentation. It may also require the profession to examine its own workforce.
Danny Russell, Chief Customer Officer at IDX, is a former Chairman of the Market Research Society and a co-founder of the Silver Insights Generation network. SIGn has highlighted estimates that only around 3 per cent of people working in UK market research are over 55. An industry charged with understanding later-life consumers cannot afford to make such limited use of the practitioners most likely to recognise a genuine need or an opportunity a younger team has never had reason to notice.
We reached the same question through different routes. Richard encountered it through brand strategy and the creation of Openly Gray. Crispin reached it where evidence has to travel through communications into organisational decisions. Danny and the SIGn network approached it through the make-up of the research profession. The conclusion is the same: the evidence exists, but it has not yet been translated into a position enough leaders are willing to fund.
Evidence that never reaches the brief is still only a fact sitting in a deck.
Move the Money
The brands most likely to benefit will not be those that issue another inclusion statement or simply change the age of the person appearing in an advertisement. They will treat later-life acquisition as a growth decision and fund it accordingly.
They should establish how much revenue and profit the 50-plus audience already contributes, compare that with the investment aimed at winning it, then identify where Ages of Acquisition are occurring. The opportunity may require a different product, a more relevant proposition or simply a serious test of acquisition economics.
The investment should be judged as any growth investment would be judged. Measure acquisition cost and conversion, margin and retention. Establish what is incremental. Increase the commitment when the evidence earns it.
This is an allocation decision before it is a communications decision.
For challenger brands, the imbalance may represent one of the largest first-mover opportunities hiding in plain sight. For category leaders, it may expose the largest portion of revenue they have never deliberately earned. Scale, shelf presence and familiarity may protect the business for years, but none of them constitutes ownership.
A brand may believe it has loyal customers because they have remained for decades. It may discover that it merely enjoyed the absence of a competitor.
The Growth Is Already There
CoverGirl’s decision will probably be described as a legacy brand returning to the women who once loved it. The more useful interpretation is that a large company finally noticed the growth sitting inside its own category.
Rethinking the Age of Acquisition means recognising that relevance can be earned at many points across a life, not only near its beginning. The consumers are already there. The money is already moving. The first brands to take the opportunity seriously will not simply add an older audience. They will define what the market expects from everyone who follows.
The brief may still end at 49. The growth does not.
About the authors
Crispin Beale is Chief Executive Officer of IDX and a former Chairman of the Market Research Society.
Richard Bell is Chief Executive Officer of Openly Gray, a strategy and creative consultancy purpose-built for the 50+ demographic.
Sources and notes
Openly Gray category-revenue and marketing-investment ranges are working benchmarks drawn from category-specific reviews. They should be validated with client, syndicated and category data before being presented as universal figures.
• Coty / CoverGirl Gen X strategy
• AARP, Longevity Economy Outlook 2026
• NielsenIQ and World Data Lab, The X Factor
• Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, What Brands Get Wrong About the Over-65 Market
• Trek comfort and recreation bicycle range
• Electra Townie range
• Nike, Why Do It? campaign history
• Levi Strauss & Co., Behind Every Original
• OXO, Behind the Design: Good Grips
• Caddis, Our Story
• Silver Insights Generation launch and workforce data