#3 The Silent Barrier: Ageism in Marketing Explained by Michelle McFarlane

In this empowering episode of the House of Fulfillment podcast, I’m joined by the brilliant Michelle McFarlane, a marketing expert from South Africa, to dive into the pressing topic of ageism in marketing. Together, we unpack how societal beliefs about aging often infiltrate not just the way we’re marketed to, but also how we see ourselves.

We become what we think and expect. If you allow the ageism in society to influence your mind, convincing you that aging is a decline—that you’re losing your vitality, attractiveness, or energy—you may unknowingly make those fears your reality. But here’s the truth: you have the power to shape your experience.

In this episode, we explore how to break free from the limits of ageism, maintain a mindset of continuous growth, and pursue your big goals with joy and determination. Don’t let age define you or your potential. Instead, live every day with freedom, happiness, and passion for your unique journey.

Age is not your limit—your mind is. Let this episode inspire you to rise above societal norms, embrace your ever-evolving self, and stay laser-focused on your dreams.

Let’s reframe what it means to age and take steps to live a life filled with fulfillment and purpose, no matter what stage of life you’re in. Tune in and take this journey with us!

Michelle has spent the course of her career helping business owners get their brands in front of their target audience. Drawing from almost 3 decades of experience in the financial and retail sectors, Michelle’s ability to think laterally shines when creating customised marketing plans. Having achieved professional success at both national and international corporate level, she now focuses on helping business owners navigate the complex world of online and offline marketing.

She knows that there is no one-size-fits-all strategy and invests heavily in continuous learning as well as building long-term relationships with the clients she serves. Wielding an uncanny ability to connect with people of all backgrounds, Michelle’s passion for working with others is contagious, adding to the enthusiasm, motivation and momentum required to make drive a successful campaign.

A desire to equip her clients with the relevant tools to understand and leverage online platforms led to the creation of #HashtagTraining. By upskilling the teams of small- and medium-sized businesses, Michelle hopes to empower people to make informed decisions about their brands’ online presence.

Having studied Accounting and Auditing, and also graduated with distinction in Brand and Marketing Management, Michelle has her finger firmly on the

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Transcript

Yes, Michelle Mcfarlane again. I'm so happy to have you with me today, and to speak about this important topic as ageism. As you know, I live in Sweden, and we are the 5th on the list. We're the 5th from the top country that has the most ageism.

I didn’t know before, but the last year I have met women who say they are discriminated against when they are searching for new jobs. It can be women who are highly educated, who have had their own business, but for some reason, they have finished that and want to go into the market and search for a job. They don’t get any job, and they are well educated. They have everything. They're very healthy, and you know all these good parameters. But anyway, they don’t get any job.

So I have started to understand how brief this matter is. Today’s topic, where we want to focus on your expertise—marketing from that perspective about ageism. I am looking forward to our call.

It’s so awesome to be with you. I know we’ve been threatening to get together for a while, so it’s really cool to be able to be with you today.
It really is. And this is so amazing also that I’m in Sweden. It’s gray. It’s cold here right now, and you are in South Africa. And it’s warm and hot and like middle of summer. And it’s amazing the technique is beautiful that we can collaborate so far from each other geographically.

How do you define ageism? What have you found that ageism is defined as?
Well, there’s a number of different things that define ageism. And actually, while we were preparing for this chat, I was looking around, and what it all boils down to is, it’s still one of the last socially acceptable forms of discrimination.

And if I can give you kind of three or four things where you’d actually probably recognize it, because lots of people might not see it as discrimination. But stereotyping is a form of discrimination, and that’s always based on age. And there’s a lot of stereotyping in advertising and marketing, where they use age as the only factor to target someone or exclude an audience.

They’re not looking at the bigger picture, and they also portray older adults in negative and stereotypical ways in advertising. They pretty much just ignore the diversity of needs that older consumers actually have, and what their preferences are. And I think that’s basically what happens. It is a form of discrimination.

I don’t like to get on a soapbox. But if you think about it, because marketing and advertising permeates all facets of your life. Whether you say you are immune to advertising or not, I can guarantee you, everybody in the home has got something that they bought because they’ve seen some form of marketing or advertising. And I think whether you’re immune to it or not, ageism affects society as a whole.
I was watching a story on TikTok the other day about a guy who runs a big ad agency, a well-known person, and he was saying he had this elderly neighbor when he was growing up.

Who got to the point? We couldn’t mow the lawn anymore, and he always used to him, and his friends used to make fun of him because he was old. He wasn’t strong. He kind of had nothing to offer. They kind of just, you know, dismissed him. And then he decided, Okay, I want to make some pocket money. So he volunteered to go mow his neighbor’s lawn every week.
And the one day the old man asked him to pack the lawnmower away, and he went into the garage.

And the whole garage wall was full of photos of him as a soldier. Medals all across the world. You know, in different campaigns that he fought in, and he was actually a highly decorated military person. And it kind of how that flipped his whole mindset when it came to every elderly, frail person that you come into contact with, was once a strong, young, strapping adult who was capable of all sorts of things, and these are a wealth of information, experience, and knowledge in older generations, that if you actually took the time to listen, you could apply to all things—advertising, marketing, just benefiting society as a whole. I think if people started valuing the elderly a little bit more.

Yes, I agree completely. And I’m thinking about our culture in the West being different from other cultures. I mean, in other tribes, you know. And so people get more and more valued because of their age, and an old person is like a leader because of their knowledge and experience of life.
Yeah, it. If we could mix ages a little bit more, it would be so much richer on, I mean, in groups and teams and everywhere.
So you spoke about… oh, I don’t find the word now. Stereotypes.
Yeah, can you? Can you give some more examples about stereotypes in marketing?

Well, if you think about it, with stereotypes, there’s three different kind of categories that we’re divided up into…
The first, which is the most predominant, is negative portrayals. So you’ve got harmful stereotypes, that frailty, you know, dependence, lack of technological expertise, for example, and those are very blanket statements. I mean, my mom is 76, and we live in a village that’s far from the nearest city, and from being someone who was very concerned about putting her credit card details online. She shops online, and she thinks it’s awesome. She doesn’t have to do anything. So she’s very tech savvy, but someone her age is normally actually written off on the e-commerce side of things or with online shopping, because people think it’s not in the audience.

And I think the biggest issue we, as a society, need to understand is the impact that has on people’s self-esteem because people don’t want to be dependent. I think when you lose that independence and ability to take care of yourself, it’s not so much that they don’t want to inconvenience others or stuff like that, but it really knocks the self-esteem and the confidence, and we can’t perpetuate that in our marketing.

So if you also look at social stigma, ageist marketing will look at negative attitudes, discrimination against older adults, not even considering that nowadays older adults actually have more discretionary income and savings than younger people do because they were brought up differently. They lived in a different time. Things were more accessible. They were probably a little more responsible. Nowadays, you know, the days of “you only live once” came well after they had gone through the money-making days, and I think that’s important for people. You don’t want to exclude people. You don’t want to forget that they have spending power. And it’s actually a very big, growing segment globally when it comes to marketing.
Yeah, and what you were talking about—self-esteem and belief—the self-image, the belief of who I am and what I’m capable of and what I ought to do. The whole society is against rising up and shining, even though we get up in age.

It’s a belief. And my mother, she’s 93. My brother lives in Canada, and my mother is 93. My dad passed away two years ago, but he would be 98 this year. They Skype with my brother in Canada. You know, they are so tech-savvy, as you said.
And I have a client—you know I’m a coach and mentor—she’s 74, and she restarted her company recently. That’s why she hired a mentor, you know. So the belief, and I also heard about research, a big study in Ohio that followed people over a period of time, quite a long period of time, older people, and they measured their blood pressure, their BMI, and other factors to see about the length of life.

And the thing that stood out, that was the factor that made a 7.6-year difference in lifespan, was attitude about being old. So if society has a negative or dismissive attitude, that affects the length of life in people.

So we have to be very strong and consciously work with our mindset to go against all these beliefs that are in society.
Absolutely. And I think a lot of the time businesses lose out on a lot of opportunities because they aren’t factoring in the older generations.

Yeah.
Absolutely.
And it’s not just that. I mean, there’s a lot of damage you can do to a brand. If you look at it… I’m just trying to think of specific examples.

I think people might think that the two of us are kind of on a soapbox and looking at the ethical side of ageism in marketing. But if we have to put it down to nuts and bolts and rands and things, or kronor at the end of the day, if it affects your pocket, you shouldn’t be doing it. So never mind that it’s the right thing to do to actually factor in those generations in your marketing and not be discriminatory—it really will affect your business at the end of the day.

Because they don’t understand the unique needs and preferences and the values of older clients. Different things are important. I’m not talking values in terms of guiding principles, but values as in what’s important to people.

And looking at product development, there are so many opportunities to develop new products by looking at it from a different angle. People have more time to consider, more experience, all those kinds of things, and sometimes the best innovation can come from an idea from someone who’s older and wiser. You don’t need to sit and try all the things they failed at over the long careers—you can jump straight to the end.
Exactly.

Yeah, that’s so true. And also, older people, or people who don’t give birth to any new children—they don’t have that, that period is gone. And they often stay at the same place and work at the same place for the rest of their working career or work life.

And they can be more selfish.
Yeah, so I mean, it spares a lot of money for the company instead of hiring new people all the time, because that’s a lot of money that goes out.
And training and onboarding, and also your corporate knowledge that comes with someone that’s been around. It’s important. People aren’t disposable. They really aren’t. I mean, I can’t imagine… the old retirement age used to be 55. I can’t imagine next year or the year after—because I’m nearly 55—turning around and saying, “Okay, I’m done now.” Like, what am I going to do for the next 20, 25, you know, hopefully 30 years? I can’t sit and do nothing. I’d go insane.

And I think that’s… nowadays, I think most people kind of—we’re getting to the point where people just can’t afford to give up working. And if you think about it, the general working population is probably 10, at least 15 years older on average than it was in our parents’ time. And if you’re leaving who you perceive to be elderly people out of the equation, those people are still working, still earning money, don’t have the financial responsibilities that they had when they were younger, and they can be more selfish and do what they want to do. So you really are ignoring a really good segment of business.

Absolutely. And because of what we were speaking about in the start of our call, or what you said, that it’s so accepted—it’s still accepted to discriminate because of age.
What signs should we be aware of, I mean, in marketing, in everything, in society?
There are a few different things. So if you first of all go look at pure exclusion as a form of discrimination. For example, a lot of tech ads feature young, tech-savvy people, and they show older people as not interested or unable to use the technology. And unfortunately, they are a huge potential market in the tech space.
If you look at youth-focused brands, those are your brands that market exclusively to younger demographics. They ignore the needs and preferences of older consumers. So if you look at fashion, beauty, food, and beverage marketing—alcohol adverts or restaurant adverts—they don’t want to show an elderly couple going out to lunch at a fancy restaurant.

Because then, oh, it’s gonna look like one of those kinds of places where, you know, four o’clock in the afternoon is dinnertime kind of vibes. And they do that—they’re really writing people off.
Then you get the usual stereotype ones—the anti-wrinkle creams, the frail and dependent imagery—and all it does is reinforce all those stereotypes. I think the other thing we have in marketing, especially nowadays, where people are very much into the DIY side of marketing and people are learning and more than capable, marketing is more accessible to small business owners and solopreneurs than it ever has been before.

You don’t need to be on TV, radio, or in magazines or newspapers anymore to get your products out there. There’s a lot of easily accessible ways. But then they’re relying on… they’re not going to go and spend hundreds of thousands on a photo shoot to get exactly what they want. They’re relying on stock photography.
So, you know, going onto a site like Freepik, even with a paid version, most of those libraries don’t feature older adults doing the things that you are selling or using the services that you’re offering. So then what do you do there? Luckily, now, with the advantages of AI, if you can learn to prompt it correctly, you can often get the kind of vision of your customer out of your head and get AI to generate images for you. You do need to obviously really be careful and make sure there’s not like seven fingers and three toes and the nose on the wrong side of the face.
But I think stock photo libraries—and I challenge everyone listening to this podcast to go onto those stock photo sites—and even Getty Images, which is hideously expensive and unless you specifically need an image probably not anything people would use—go and have a look, and you’ll see everything’s focused on younger models.

You then have no relatable imagery. And remember, in order for someone to be attracted to your brand and your products and services, they need to see themselves in your marketing.
People think it’s so subtle and that nobody’s going to notice.
But they notice. As South Africans, we are very aware of diversity and inclusion and history. All of that kind of goes to what we do. And how many people will go and say, “Okay, I need a Black face for this specific advert because that’s our demographic,” and then go and get a picture of an African American off Canva?
It’s not the same thing. And if you are a specific South African Black individual, you want to see South African Black images in your marketing. Otherwise, you’re going to go, “These people have no clue.”

And it’s just… it can degenerate into chaos. But anyway, let me stop. So, I think the other thing to understand is if advertising only targets the young, or shows things that only young people can supposedly do, they feel excluded, and psychologically, that has an effect. And it can do damage to your brand, because even if they could very happily use your product, because you are excluding them and ignoring them in your imagery—and it can be as simple as a picture, you know, “a picture is worth a thousand words”—it can be as simple as a picture, they would go, “Okay, these people are not interested in my money. They’re not interested in my business, so I’m not going to bother with them. I’ll go find somebody who does keep me in mind as a customer.”

And then the other thing I think people need to be very aware of is… I have a client and a friend who is… she calls herself a librarian for websites. She’s an information architect, and her thing is search.
Search from a perspective of how do people search for things? What do people call things? And if you make very complex websites that are very difficult to navigate, and you move your menus to funny places because you think it’s cool, you’re really discouraging older people from using things. Like having white text on a pale background, having your menu buttons too small, having your phone button so small that someone with a slightly wobbly hand can’t actually hit that button, even if they tried on their phone.

And anything that’s difficult to navigate—if they can’t find what they’re looking for in three clicks—it stops them from engaging with your brand. So you need to be mindful. Accessibility is a thing.
And just, not everything has to be cool and hip and the latest flashy stuff. I’m sure you remember when websites first became a thing and you could get animation on websites, and they weren’t just static pages. But if you look at that, when Flash came about, every website you went onto had moving pictures and this popping up and that going here, you know, it’s almost like death by PowerPoint when people learn animations.

And that is very, very disconcerting for people who are looking for information.
I think you need to really, really understand including your older adults into your marketing.
And I think we have to speak about it a lot so people get aware of it, because we know how sneaky things go into our subconscious. We really can…
And I think the sad thing about it, and why it’s so difficult to change, is that people are not aware that they’re making these mistakes.
No.

It doesn’t factor into the thought process. Whereas the more you actually talk about it, the more people will step back and go, “You know what? Actually, an older demographic with more disposable income is probably much easier to sell to than the younger demographic.”
Yeah.

I mean, Stanley cups are a perfect example where it’s marketed specifically to kids and probably young moms, housewives kind of vibes.
How quickly did they come in, become all the fad, and then gone?
And I think if that’s your demographic, whereas your older audience is more likely to make a wise investment and stick with what they’ve done.
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. This is something we could speak about for a very, very long time because it’s such a huge topic. But also, maybe it is because it’s women that have been most vulnerable in this with age.
And we all know that it is a fact that women are often put aside. They’re not listened to in the big picture. And you can look at this with women in the menopause period.

And there are not so many workplaces that take responsibility to help people, women, go through this period. They don’t accommodate the workplace for this group of people. And I mean, it’s something every woman goes through at a certain age.

I think the one good thing that’s happened, and it’s probably thanks to TikTok, is that it’s become an acceptable topic to speak about and not just something that men made nasty jokes about behind their wives’ backs, kinds of things.
It’s actually now become very acceptable to speak about what’s going on and what all of the things… And, you know, people think that they’re going absolutely crazy. And then everybody goes, “No, that’s just normal.” But yes, it’s normal, but like, how do you deal with it? And I think the conversations have started in that informal space where people find it a safer space and less judgmental. I think it’s a long way off before employers start accommodating things like that.
And you can understand—we’ve been through the same debate with smokers versus non-smokers in the workplace, for example. I know in some companies in Japan, they’re giving non-smokers five days extra leave every year to make up for the smoke breaks that the smokers take. So I think it’s a matter of time. But the more we talk about it, and the more marketing absolutely affects society…
And if you think about it, every single person who gets up and goes out and interacts with other people is marketing. And not necessarily marketing, you know, this pen, or this cell phone, but it’s the personal brand.

And that’s a form of marketing—how do you go about, and how do you interact with people? We had an example in the pharmacy the other day. Now, we only have one pharmacy in our village. Everybody knows the pharmacist incredibly well, to the point that in an emergency, you know, they’ll go open up after hours. Awesome bunch of guys.

In December, we go from 6,000 people to 50,000 people with all the holidaymakers that come from other provinces.
And we had an example in the pharmacy where all the rest of us go, and we let the elderly… Tuesday is Pensioners’ Day at our local supermarket. So they tend to do everything on a Tuesday. This old guy walked into the pharmacy, and the standard thing is, we let the elderly go first, or they walk through to the front of the queue, and there’s a chair for them to sit on. Nobody fusses.
And this young… not that young, old enough to know better, 40-odd-year-old man from Johannesburg, not local, went absolutely ballistic on this elderly gentleman in December because he jumped the queue.

And it was just a total disproportionate reaction to this elderly person, and it just made absolutely no sense. And I think it’s disrespectful. You know, it’s like… Okay, we were taught growing up, you always respected your elders.
If you walk into… if an elderly person walks in, gets on the bus, gets on the train… If you are younger than me, you get up and offer your seat.
But nowadays, it seems to be this permeation of entitlement that runs through where everybody thinks they’re the most important person in the universe, and they don’t really take time for others.
So this is such an important thing to speak about. And I think also this menopausal thing has to do with a shame—that it shows that I am older. It’s all… it’s again back to this view of age.

Yes, exactly. Because you think now that you’re older and you can’t have kids anymore that you can’t add value. I watched a talk the other day, saying that there’s a reason women live longer than men, and it’s apart from the standard jokes that all come out, it’s that when women hit that age, they…
They need to focus on passing on the knowledge to future generations. And this particular scientist believes that it’s factored in by evolution where they stop having to care for others—they can care about themselves and focus on educating the younger audiences.

And that period from 55 to 75 is your time to pass on generational knowledge to the younger generations. And I think people need to start looking at that as an absolute mine of information and experience. I’m not just talking about women, but generally that is there that you can draw from and learn from, particularly, I think, on the emotional intelligence side.
Not everybody’s necessarily… you know, if you talk about emotional intelligence… When I started my career, even in the late 1980s, if you talked about emotional intelligence… I was the only woman doing my articles at a firm of chartered accountants, and out of 29, I was the only woman. And, you know, it’s…
That’s how things have changed. Now, the head of audit at that particular firm is a woman, and I think it just adds a different play. And you need to understand that with marketing, you can learn something from everybody that you meet. Don’t exclude anybody.

I mean, obviously, you’re not going to try and sell baby formula bottles to a granny. But you could… I mean, if the marketing’s being your babysitting, you know, you might think… you might suggest the… I don’t know. I just… everything. Don’t write people off because of their age, and be mindful of what you’re putting out there.
And I think if anything comes from our conversation today, it would be just to get someone to go, “You know what? Let me go and look at the stuff that I’ve put out there. Am I guilty of ageism?”
Because I guarantee you, 90% of people don’t do it intentionally. It’s just awareness.

Yes, it is absolutely, and we are a part of increasing the awareness today.
Thank you so much, and in the end, I would love to hear something about how you, in your company, help people—what you can help people with.
Absolutely. Well, on that topic, I’ll tell you that our oldest client started with us during lockdown at the age of 78, and…
…she’s absolutely, wickedly funny and full of energy. And she wanted to talk about doing coaching about life after infidelity.

She’s almost 80. She’s now 81. And she started a business in lockdown online, doing her own email marketing. She wanted to do it all herself—not because she couldn’t afford to pay us to do it, but because she wanted to learn the skills.
Email marketing, building landing pages, shooting TikTok videos—she’s on TikTok. And that’s what we like to do: we want people to grow their businesses. So we do marketing across the board. We can either do it with you—to save on budget, you put stuff together and we make sure you execute it correctly—or we can do it for you, which is where we take over.

And normally what happens… or we can teach you how to do it. And invariably, I have to tell you, a huge portion of our customer base now are people we originally taught how to do it themselves and have grown their businesses to a point where they go, “You know what? This is awesome, but I don’t want to do it anymore. You do it for us.”

So no matter how small or big the budget is, that’s what we do. We also have a team of 10 of us. The business was built entirely work-from-anywhere, not wherever-whenever. We have a team of 10 that are all over in different places in South Africa, in Ireland, everywhere—in England as well. Our social media manager moved from Durban in South Africa to England. It made no difference; she’s just working remotely from somewhere else.
So we can do everything. We do web development, we’re very focused on strategy, we do emails and automation, social media—anything that you could possibly need with marketing or to market your business, we can help you with. That’s what we focus on.

But my big thing is, for us specifically in South Africa, where our youth unemployment is hitting 50%, it’s really bad. And our normal unemployment rates are incredibly high. It’s about taking people who… everybody has skills. They have some kind of tradable skill or shareable knowledge and helping them put that into a business and go out there and get it done.

So it doesn’t matter how small your budget is. It doesn’t matter how big your budget is. We don’t do packages. Everything is tailor-made to what you need to achieve and how much money you’ve got to spend. And then, if you can’t spend it all, we do the tricky bits, and we teach you how to take care of the easy stuff.
So we don’t like corporate clients. We both spent many, many years in corporate—it’s not our vibe at all. So any small to medium-sized business—it actually doesn’t matter how big the medium-sized businesses are—as long as you don’t have a corporate attitude, we’ll work with you. It’s cool.

Beautiful. So I really recommend your service, and I will put out your contact info with the podcast so people can easily reach out to you.
That’ll be awesome. And we work with clients all over the world.
Yeah, so good. Thank you so much for what you have contributed with today.
Hope you can do this again sometime.
I would love to. And thank you to all you listeners that have been with us in House of Fulfillment Podcast today. I am your host.
See you soon again. Bye.