Brands, Queenagers and letting them know we exist!

Women 45-65 outspend millennials by 250% but hardly any brands speak to us, I'm asking for a little favour

Dear Queenager,

I was at Meta (used to be Facebook) last week talking about how marketing, advertising and media ignore women 45 plus - the demographic I call Queenagers - despite us controlling 95% of all household consumer spending decisions and being what Forbes Magazine calls Super Consumers. I pointed out that this is because we women are seen through a patriarchal, male lens which values women for being fecund and fanciable and isn’t very interested in us when we aren’t. As a newspaper executive I got used to being asked to use a picture of a pretty young woman to “Brighten up a page” and for it to be hard to get an older woman on the cover of the magazine I edited (inevitably the more senior man I reported to wanted to use a picture of her when she was younger). This is why I started my platform for women in midlife noon.org.uk and this Queenager substack. It is so brilliant not to have to filter my opinions through the lens of a more senior man.

I have been campaigning on the male lens and how it judges and excludes women through my work at Women in Journalism (where I was Chair 2014-2021) for a long time. This perspective informs everything I do at Noon and in my substack. I can’t be silenced or told I don’t know what I am talking about because I do, I have been inside the belly of the beast; I know its values and how it thinks. It is why this newsletter feels so different… I am now trying to make others aware of the male lens and to see how it distorts how we value the later stages of women’s lives; why over half of Queenagers feel invisible, and why only 3% of women over 40 feel represented in advertising.

I use the slide above as my backdrop now when I go and talk to audiences about Queenagers. All the data comes from the research we did at my platform noon.org.uk with Accenture, the biggest study yet of women in this bracket their attitudes to themselves, their lives and the brands that ignore them. (If you’d like me to present it to you and your company get in touch eleanor@inherspace.co.uk - it is the insight that powers the consulting side of my business).

Anyway - it is now nearly two years since we launched Noon and a year since we did the research and we are beginning to get some cut through. We’ve been approached by a very large food brand who are interested in appealing to Queenagers (the current cost-of-living squeeze is making them realise that women like us control the purse strings!). It is a bit of a eureka moment for me that some big brands are finally realising Queenagers exist and might be worth talking to (just think about which brands feature older women - usually only ads for incontinence pants or life insurance or stair lifts).

So I was wondering if - in solidarity with the Queenager cause - you might take a couple of minutes today to fill in this  Supermarket survey. It would be super useful to us to have some up-to-the-minute data to share before our meeting on Wednesday. And if it all comes off there will be lots of goodies to share with all of you lovely ladies. And, most importantly, we might begin to change the conversation about older women, how we are perceived and what we are capable of doing.

The survey is about your supermarket shopping habits.

In solidarity i’ll tell you mine. We shop at Sainsbury’s (or rather my partner does and always has done the food shopping, I cook) and we have an Oddbox of funny vegetables which would otherwise go to landfill (I love it) and I am a frequenter of the amazing Italian deli at the top of my road called Salvinos and buy my bread from the super Kentish Town hipster sour-dough bakery called Bread by Bike (oh their cinnamon buns….)

How about you? Please fill in our  Supermarket survey and tell us!

My proper Eleanor’s Letter newsletter comes out tomorrow.

Feel free to use the slide and the statistics above, if you could attribute them to me and Noon I’d be grateful.

xxx