Michael Tamblyn - CEO of Rakuten Kobo.
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The most dangerous assumptions are usually the ones you don’t realize you’re making. If you’re smart, passionate and dedicated, you can typically solve problems that are in front of you. It’s the ones that are just out of your line of sight that can hit the hardest.
The tech world has a problem with its frame of vision: It doesn’t like to look at older people. So many of the designers, engineers and executives who make these products see ages like 60, 70 and 80 as far in the distance. And one of the hardest things for a person to do is remember that the world is full of people who aren’t like us (even if you’re going to be one of those people very soon — happy 40th birthday, millennials!).
But this general lack of interest comes not just in the face of the population as a whole getting older. Older adults also have, according to some sources, the most buying power and the most willingness to spend it. Our reflexes are failing us. Assuming that a product made for a 20-year-old will work the same way for a 70-year-old means you’re going to annoy or outright alienate the older market — if they notice you at all. And then that huge chunk of the population with all that money will buy someone else’s stuff.
I was lucky enough to get a lesson in the early days of our company. I got schooled by Alan, an 85-year-old who had a problem with our product, which made me realize we had a problem with our thinking. We were a tech startup staffed by smart young people who were going to revolutionize the world of reading. We were making products for other smart young people who were ready to have books join the digital revolution that had already come for music, movies and our social lives.
We weren’t thinking about Alan, whose e-reader was going to give him his lifelong passion back — that was for sure. But there he was. At 70, his eyesight had started deteriorating. At 75, it got so bad that he had to give up reading. We had never thought about it, but here we were, a bunch of 30-somethings accidentally giving an octogenarian a huge part of his life back.
Alan’s story was enough to give us the next boost we needed as a startup making the transition to scale up. We realized that our biggest opportunity was in the place we weren’t looking. We found that the reading world is powered by two groups: under 21 and over 45, conveniently missing almost all of that sought-after 18-35 early adopter demographic.
The people who spend the most time (and money) reading aren’t 16-year-olds (busy with friends), 21-year-olds (busy with school) or even 30-year-olds (busy with kids). But at 45, the combination of career, disposable income, and older kids sends a lot of people to the bookshelf, and they don’t look back. They are the least likely accelerant to a digital transformation but, it turns out, absolutely essential. We put those people at the center of our business, and now they make up 81% of our customers.
I don’t have to wonder what our company would look like if I didn’t get that call. I can just look at the rest of the tech sector. Ignoring an older audience is a habit that hasn’t changed in the last decade, outside of a fairly predictable crop of variations on “Uber for homecare” or companies that really want to tag seniors with trackers. What is changing is the consequences. We’re at the point where ignoring this particular segment of the population is not just merely thoughtless; it’s willfully destroying shareholder value.
The explosion in senior tech usage is not coming; it's already happened. Even before the pandemic made everyone’s lives more digital, the habits of people 65 and older were starting to look more like TikTok teens than Grandpa Simpson. In 2013, 18% of older adults owned smartphones. By 2017, it was 42%. In early 2020, according to an AARP survey, it was 81% for those ages 60-69 and 62% for those 70-plus. And this isn’t just so they can occasionally FaceTime: 95% of participants between the ages of 60 and 69 say they use their smartphones daily.
Those numbers are close enough to the coveted 18-49 demographic that there’s almost no point in making a distinction between them. And there’s only going to be less of a point as the 20- and 30-somethings who were early adopters a decade ago start to reach for reading glasses. If you’re making a product these days, you’re making it for everyone, whether you realize it or not.
Where the distinction is still important is the experience of using that product. The needs of a 70-year-old are different from the needs of a 20-year-old. But they’re not a mystery. Or at least, they won’t be when you acknowledge that you need to consider them and then start designing to accommodate them.
Of course, awareness is the easy part. The hard part is continuously stretching yourself beyond your habits. We’ve put our designers in the middle of retirement homes to see how our products function in the wild. We’ve invited retirees into our brainstorming sessions to help us see what we’re missing. We even started a senior-focused literacy initiative to introduce them to the joys of e-books. But we’re never done. We’re always one day from slipping back into that rut — to thinking that we’re the only people we make things for.
That’s when it’s time for another meeting, another reminder, another face-to-face with our real customers. Because it’s not enough to have a plan or a goal. If serving these customers wasn’t carefully baked into everything we do, we wouldn’t be serving anyone at this point. We can’t afford to assume we have them covered just because we talk a good game. And neither, these days, can you.
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