Marketing long-term care insurance. Public education ads to the proper target must precede sales efforts.

The ingredients for a financial calamity affecting both government and individual citizens and their families are in place. Federal legislators have made little progress in addressing the health care needs of an aging America, and the proposals that have been advanced offer little or nothing in the way of better help with long-term care. One potential scenario is that middle-income retirees placed in long-term care will exhaust their finances and then turn to Medicaid, creating an enormous expense for the government. Long-term care insurance could alleviate the situation, but current practices by the insurance industry in marketing products to the elderly complicate the sale of such insurance. Consumers approaching retirement age are receptive to this type of product, but first they must be made aware of the merits of long-term care insurance and the paucity of alternatives. Only then can marketers promote specific products successfully.

Comparative analysis: subsegments of the elderly to younger adults.

The purpose of this paper is to shed some further insight into the elderly market. Based on the results reported in recent literature in marketing and healthcare, we broke down the elderly market into three subsegments: 55-64; 65-74; and over 74. Using a series of general and political lifestyle statements, a comparative analysis was carried out to determine if there were in fact differences between younger consumers and each of the subsegments of the elderly, as well as between each of the subsegments of the elderly. The principal technique used to carry out the analysis was MANOVA. The results indicate that there are significant differences between each of the age groups analyzed, and that more careful attention must be paid to gaining a better understanding of the elderly market.