The tremendous heterogeneity in functional and demographic characteristics of the over-65 age group presents challenges to effective marketing and public-health communications. Messages grounded on tacit assumptions that older people are frail, incompetent, and needy risk being overlooked by most of the older population; on the other hand, ignoring age-associated vulnerabilities is problematic. We argue that although traditional approaches to market segmentation based on chronological age often fail, reliable age differences in motivation influence the types of information that older people typically prefer, attend to, and remember, and these differences can be used to inform communication efforts. Socioemotional selectivity theory maintains that as future time horizons grow limited—as they typically do with age—emotional goals are prioritized over goals that focus on exploration. As time left becomes more limited, positive messages are remembered better than negative ones, and products that help people savor the moment are preferred over those that benefit the long-term future. In addition, emphasizing individual strengths and personal resilience is likely to be especially appealing to older people.

65 岁以上年龄组的功能和人口特征的巨大异质性给有效的营销和公共卫生传播带来了挑战。以老年人虚弱、无能和贫困的默认假设为基础的信息有可能被大多数老年人忽视；另一方面，忽视与年龄相关的脆弱性是有问题的。我们认为，尽管基于实际年龄的传统市场细分方法经常失败，但动机中可靠的年龄差异会影响老年人通常喜欢、关注和记住的信息类型，并且这些差异可用于为沟通工作提供信息。社会情感选择性理论认为，随着未来的时间范围变得有限——就像他们通常随着年龄增长那样——情感目标优先于专注于探索的目标。随着剩下的时间变得越来越有限，积极信息比消极信息更容易被记住，帮助人们享受当下的产品比那些有利于长期未来的产品更受欢迎。此外，强调个人优势和个人韧性可能对老年人特别有吸引力。