Ageing stars for ageing consumers? Analysing the silver market phenomenon

Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) with her new Apple laptop in "And Just Like That" directed by Michael Patrick King, produced by HBO Max, 2021.
Image credit: photographed by Craig Blankenhorn for HBO Max.
Written by: Gloria Dagnino
In July this year, the HBO Max dramedy And Just Like That (AJLT) became the first television show ever to feature a scene set inside an authentic Apple store, namely the one located in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The scene depicts Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), accompanied by her friend Seema (Sarita Choudhury), shopping for a new laptop, after her long-lasting MacBook got damaged in a clumsy, Zoom-related accident. Permission to shoot inside the store came from Tim Cook, the company’s CEO himself, as a result of the longstanding collaboration between the tech brand and the show, which dates back to the original, late 1990s Sex and the City (Peikert, 2023). Apple is but one of the plentiful brands to have renewed their collaboration with the show twenty years in, when stars Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon and Kristen Davis are all in their late fifties. Whether it be a long-standing collaboration or a brand-new partnership, whether in the form of product placement or endorsement, advertisers’ interest in older celebrities is growing. Recent examples include US fashion retailer J. Crew’s collaboration with Diane Keaton (76) and Julianne Moore (61); Kim Cattrall (67)’s endorsement of UK luxury e-commerce platform Farfetch; and Isabelle Huppert’s (70) appointment as first female brand ambassador for fashion house Balenciaga.
The use of ageing celebrities for promotional purposes can be framed within the so-called ‘silver market phenomenon’ (Kohlbacher and Herstatt, 2011), which refers to the ever-expanding segment of 50 or 55+ consumers and the business strategies that companies implement to cater for them. According to the United Nations, the global population aged 65 and over is growing faster than all other age groups, and by 2050 one in six people in the world will be over 65 (one in four in Europe and North America). In business terms, this creates opportunities for new revenue streams to be tapped through dedicated management and marketing tools, including leveraging the symbolic capital of senior celebrities. Indeed, as Rojek (2001: 189) pointed out, ageing celebrities function as ‘objects of nostalgia that can be further commodified by the market’. The appeal to such nostalgic quality is epitomised in the commercial, directed by Guy Ritchie, that French jewellery giant Cartier presented during the 2023 Paris fashion week. The video stars the actual Catherine Deneuve (79), as well as multiple digitally de-aged versions of herself, strolling through the Alexandre III Parisian bridge and exchanging gazes with Hollywood actor Rami Malek (42). The video is a tribute to Deneuve’s beauty and career, but it is also Guy Ritchie’s love letter to 1950s and 60s French cinema, and to Paris in its romanticized, cinematic version. However, as Marshall and Rahman (2015: 580) suggested, ageing celebrities do not merely act as ‘nostalgic reminders of their or their audience’s youth’. Instead, their function in marketing campaigns is very much geared towards the future. From a marketer’s perspective, the association with a senior celebrity conveys a sense of timelessness, while positioning the brand as relevant and trustworthy regardless of passing fads. From a consumer’s perspective, ageing celebrities embody aesthetic and lifestyle models to aspire to – and to buy into – at every stage of one’s life.
Marketers’ increasing use of older celebrities as endorsers has been positively seen as an attempt to acknowledge and be inclusive of the ‘silver market’, a hitherto neglected segment of the population (Chan and Fan, 2022). Others have pointed to the critical implications of framing consumerism as the highway to empowering senior citizens into a more active, satisfactory lifestyle (Rozanova, 2010). Such an idea feeds into broader neo-liberal discourses that shift onto the individual the responsibility for achieving (or failing to achieve) goals of collective and political significance, such as effective health care, adequate level of income and, ultimately, a good quality of life. Scholars (such as Kenalemang, 2022) have also emphasized that what advertising promotes through senior celebrities is a specific model of ‘successful ageing’ (Rowe and Kahn, 1997),one that bears gendered ageist connotations. Women are pressured sooner and stronger than men to adhere to aesthetic models and lifestyles that hide or erase the very traits of ageing and old age, while purportedly claiming to celebrate them. Trying to unpack and address the different, at times conflicting, cultural meanings that inform the cinematic and media representation of ageing and old age, as well as the forces behind them (including consumer culture), is one of the endeavors that the AGE-C team is pursuing. To learn more about the questions and methods guiding this project, you can visit the AGE-C project description page.

Isabelle Huppert as the new brand ambassador for Balenciaga.
Credit: Photographed by Stef Mitchell for Balenciaga.
Reference list:
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Peikert, Mark (2023), “And Just Like That… the ‘Sex and the City’ Sequel Became the First Show Ever to Film in an Apple Store”, IndieWire, 22 June 2023. www.indiewire.com/features/craft/and-just-like-that-nyc-locations-michael-patrick-king-1234877649/ (last accessed 16 September 2023).
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United Nations https://www.un.org/en/global-issues/ageing
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