It is one of the most prevalent ideas in the brand world: Capture the brand loyalty of a person when they are young, and they will be yours forever. Companies pursue this idea with a vengeance, abandoning older audiences to win the hearts and minds of children, teens, and college students. And it is one of the biggest mistakes brand professionals can make.

A recent study showed that, in fact, consumers are likely to switch brands within a range of product categories regardless of age, indicating that brand loyalty is not captured at a young age and held for life. A different study, conducted for AARP, echoed this finding, demonstrating that in some categories, older consumers are less loyal and actually more likely to switch brands.

Think about your own life: You are probably not wearing the same clothing brands you did in your youth. Or driving the same car brand. Or even using the same kind of laundry detergent. Your tastes change. Your household income changes. You get married, have kids, get busy, retire. There are very few brands that can see a person through all those changes in life—and there are very few brands that should even try.

Taste, Experience, and Self-Expression
The “get ‘em while they’re young” theory works differently among three different types of brands:

• Taste Brands—food, beverage, or household brands that involve your sense of taste or smell
• Experience Brands—when the consumer experience can be the driving factor, such as financial services, retail, and online brands
• Self-Expression Brands—when the products you use say something about you, such as clothing, automotive, and some electronics

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Last night, on ABC’s World News Tonight, I was pleased to see that Kaiser’s Supermarkets in Germany has introduced several innovations to cater to older grocery shoppers. Having commented on the wonders of Stop and Shop’s Peapod home delivery service last week, you might think I am obsessed with groceries. I’m not. Actually, what it points to is a brain trust among marketers in the grocery business. They are taking a low-margin, commodity business and re-inventing it by applying common sense to customer service.

According to ABC, Kaiser’s Supermarkets realized that older shoppers spend more on groceries and therefore should be catered to with magnifying glasses attached to shopping cart handles, seats built into the carts for a quick rest, brighter lighting, sturdy shelving with built-in steps to reach higher shelves and a help button that summons a real person to answer questions or provide other assistance. Of course, all of these service features will prove useful to younger shoppers as well. The full video can be viewed at www.abcnews.com.

These common sense adaptations will do more to bring meaning to the company’s brand than ads, slogans, taglines and logos could ever hope to. I can only hope that gas stations are taking notes.

I hear that there is a new search engine with my name on it: Cranky. Actually, although I might be attitudinally suited, it’s really aimed at people age 50+ and I’m younger than that. It’s the brainchild of Jeff Taylor, who left his previous big hit–Monster.com–to create Eons for the boomer generation and now this search engine. The home page for cranky.com actually talks about “cranking up an engine” as the inspiration for the name but I think cantankerous connotations couldn’t have been far behind.

Cranky is based on the premise that serving up search results based on what other people of a similar age wanted to see is useful. I question this premise. How much of anyone’s curiosity is based on age? Yes, before the age of 10, it is, but after that, I think other factors overtake age. Since Cranky likes to point out the virtues of living to be 100 years old, how similar are people from ages 50 to 100? It strikes me that such a broad demographic is a marketing ploy, not really a community of interest.

By the way, when I used the Cranky search yesterday, it listed the most popular search topic as Sex. I think that proves my point. Is that so different than the results for 30 and 40 year olds?