By John I. Todor, Ph.D., Author of Addicted Customers (www.Addictedcustomers.com)
I just left www.cranky.com. This is search engine
designed to please aging Baby Boomers. As they put it, “surfing the Web exhausts—and
even exasperates—older people.” The search engine is allegedly designed to
process each request from the perspective of someone at least 50 years old. This
is inherently a good idea. As we age our thought processes do change as to the
question we have and the type of answers we seek. However, if the site is based
on this premise, “It’s hard from them (those over 50) to understand all the
results,” the have got it wrong.
Today’s baby boomers are
healthier and mentally sharper than any previous generation. They are less
interested in “things” and more interested in “experiences”. They are less
interested in information and more interested in answers. The focus is
different. If www.cranky.com helps
overcome these shortcoming of existing search engines—terrific. But if the name
is intended to imply people over 50 are mentally challenged and that makes them
cranky—we’ll as a baby boomer that premise makes me cranky.
I commend the effort to
launch the first “age-relevant” search engine but hope they lose the name and
more importantly, lose the negative premise. It could be worth their effort.
Baby boomers control more than two-thirds of the wealth in this country.
Thanks for the heads up on that site.
Personally, I think the appeal will be more "affinity-based" than "relevance-based".
What I mean by that: I (perhaps too half-jokingly) sometimes refer to myself as the "cranky old guy".
So I view the "cranky" moniker at cranky.com as more of a tongue-in-cheek term of endearment than anything else. (go check out www.mrcranky.com to see "cranky" applied to movie reviews).
And, in fact, based on research I did while I was at Forrester Research, boomers DO tend to be more cynical, sarcastic, and yes, cranky than other generations.
Anyway -- thanks for this and the other good stuff you've posted.
-- Ron
Posted by: Ron Shevlin | January 15, 2007 at 10:59 AM