Points out that the aging population has captured the attention of marketers, but that many companies are still uncertain as to whether they should, or how they should, go about marketing to the mature market. Highlights some of the key issues marketers are confronted with and discusses reasons...

Social scientists, public policy makers, consumer researchers, and marketers have traditionally focused on age‐related differences to understand the behavior of older adults. This research focuses on the processes through which adults learn behavioral patterns and norms that characterize...

Researchers have long recognized the importance of studying consumption activities over time, but they have had inadequate theories and methods for studying consumers over the course of their lives. This paper suggests that the life course paradigm that has been widely used in social sciences...

States that although the concept of “stress” has received increased attention in the behavioral and social sciences throughout the past five decades, it has been virtually ignored by consumer researchers. Presents conceptual and theoretical underpinnings of stress research, which suggest...

Although older American spend increasingly large sums of money on goods and services, it is widely believed by financial service providers and retailers that these individuals make relatively little use of credit cards. Using a large national sample of respondents from different age groups,...