Capital Aging: Grow your business the age-friendly way!
An Age-Friendly Business adapts its services, products, and environments (store and online) to the needs of its older customers. Their product and service needs, shopping patterns, and expectations are different from those of younger consumers, due to their life stage, interests, and available leisure time.
Older consumers are also a diverse group. Many changes to products, services, and retail spaces to accommodate older consumers are simple, low-cost, and can go a long way to gain and retain them as loyal consumers.
Commitment and collaboration of stakeholders in governments, communities, and businesses are required. Marketing to and serving older consumers better is a competitive advantage, a win-win for older consumers, businesses, and our community.
Download the 2018 Special Report - Tapping into the older customer market in Ottawa
Grow your business the age-friendly way!
The City of Ottawa’s senior population is growing. In fact, the 156,880 seniors living in Ottawa today will more than double in the next 10 years. This makes them the fastest growing markets in our community. Seniors will go from 15% of the population to over 20% of our city’s population in 2031.
That is potentially 1 in 5 of your customers!
We believe this is a significant opportunity for Ottawa businesses. We want to increase the number and types of businesses that serve seniors well in Ottawa.
We believe seniors are a growing asset in our community who have significant economic capital. Seniors in Ottawa are the fastest growing age group with significant spending power; worth $12.6B per year and growing. Ottawa’s older adults are among the most educated and wealthy when compared to older adults in most other municipalities. The size and wealth of Ottawa’s older population mean their spending power will also increase over the next several decades. In 2015, seniors had a median income of $39,500, higher than the national average of $27,400. According to the Conference Board of Canada, Canadians over the age of 50 have 64% more disposable income than people under 30. While the nature of consumption of older Canadians changes over time, their overall levels of consumption do not decline significantly as they age. The older consumer market is also stimulating new companies, products, services, and technologies as well as bring significant tourism dollars into cities.
We believe seniors deserve excellent customer service. Research shows older consumers are more loyal consumers and vocal about the quality of the consumer service they receive from businesses. Despite their economic capital and consumer habits, many seniors feel invisible or irrelevant. Seniors want their retirement income to not only work for them but to stretch to provide a good later life. Seniors have told us that many businesses either do not cater to their needs or are ageist in their customer service interactions. Further to this experience, seniors feel they are targets for financial frauds, making older adults leery of businesses trying to hard sell them. Therefore, customer service and marketing practices are missing the potential to profit from this growing market of older consumers.
