The Day I Realized I Wasn’t the Target Customer Anymore

There was no official notification.

No letter arrived in the mail.

No government agency issued a certificate.

No one from corporate America showed up at my door, handed me a plaque, and thanked me for my years of loyal service before informing me that my demographic had been retired.

Yet somewhere along the way, it happened.

I stopped being the target customer.

The realization did not arrive all at once. It came in pieces. Small moments. Tiny clues scattered throughout everyday life. Individually, they seemed insignificant. Collectively they formed a picture that became impossible to ignore.

One day I was walking through a store and realized I didn’t recognize half the brands on the shelves.

Another day I saw a commercial and couldn’t figure out what they were selling until the final five seconds.

A few weeks later I found myself watching a television show where every character looked about twelve years old, despite apparently being doctors, lawyers, detectives, and CEOs.

The evidence kept piling up.

The world had not changed overnight.

I had.

For most of our lives, we don’t think much about marketing. We assume advertisements simply exist. Companies make products. Commercials appear. New things are introduced. Life goes on.

What we often fail to realize is that enormous industries are built around deciding exactly who matters.

Every product, advertisement, website, social media campaign, movie, television show, app, and marketing strategy is aimed at someone.

And eventually, that someone is no longer you.

The first clue should have been social media.

I remember when Facebook felt revolutionary.

People reconnected with old friends. Shared family photos. Posted vacation pictures. Argued about politics long before everyone decided that arguing about politics should become a full-time profession.

Then younger generations began leaving.

Suddenly Facebook became the digital equivalent of a mall walker convention.

The kids moved to Instagram.

Then TikTok.

Then whatever platform currently exists that I haven’t heard about yet because apparently information now spreads at the speed of light among people born after 2000.

The moment I hear about a new social platform, it is usually because someone is writing an article explaining why younger users are abandoning it.

Which means I am already late.

Again.

Then there is music.

Every generation believes the music they grew up with was the last great era.

Our parents said it.

Their parents said it.

We say it.

Someday today’s teenagers will be sitting around insisting that whatever artist is currently dominating streaming services represented the peak of human creativity.

History is a flat circle.

Still, there comes a moment when you turn on a music awards show and genuinely cannot identify a single performer.

Not one.

You find yourself reading entertainment headlines the same way anthropologists study ancient civilizations.

Who are these people?

Why are they famous?

Why does everyone seem to know them except me?

And perhaps most importantly, why are they all apparently named after random combinations of letters and punctuation?

The same thing happened with technology.

I love technology.

I’ve spent decades working with systems, operations, software, websites, automation, and business tools.

I am not someone who fears technology.

But there was a time when technology was designed to make life simpler.

Now it often feels designed to ensure that every task requires six passwords, two-factor authentication, an app download, a software update, and a blood sample.

The other day I parked downtown and discovered that I could not simply put money into a parking meter.

No.

I had to download an app.

Create an account.

Verify my email.

Verify my phone number.

Accept terms and conditions that were approximately the length of War and Peace.

And then enter my credit card information so I could spend three dollars to park my SUV.

At some point, convenience became a hostage situation.

The restaurant industry has joined the movement.

Remember menus?

Physical menus.

Those wonderful laminated documents that somehow managed to function without Wi-Fi.

Now many restaurants hand you a QR code.

You scan it.

The website doesn’t load.

You try again.

The menu appears.

The font is microscopic.

Half the descriptions are cut off.

Then your phone brightness adjusts itself and suddenly you’re reading dinner options through what appears to be a solar eclipse.

I don’t want to sound old. Despite now having a pair of cheater glasses in my car, by my bed, on my desk, and possibly having had to use my phone’s flashlight to read a menu a few nights ago…

But I also don’t want to need technical support to order a cheeseburger.

The most fascinating part of all this is that companies are not making a mistake.

They know exactly what they are doing.

Marketing is about future revenue.

The average 22-year-old has decades of purchasing ahead of them.

The average 53-year-old has fewer.

That isn’t cruel.

It’s math.

Businesses follow money the same way rivers follow gravity.

They always have.

They always will.

What changes is how it feels when you realize you’re no longer standing at the center of the stream.

For years, movies, television, advertisements, and products reflected people who looked roughly like you.

Then one day they don’t.

The shift is subtle.

The heroes get younger.

The influencers get younger.

The celebrities get younger.

Meanwhile you somehow continue getting older despite having made no such request.

This feels deeply unfair.

In my mind I am still roughly thirty-five.

My knees disagree.

My back has submitted supporting documentation.

My reflection occasionally offers additional evidence.

Yet mentally, most of us remain remarkably consistent.

The person inside often feels much younger than the person visible in the mirror.

Which is why these cultural shifts can feel surprising.

We don’t notice ourselves aging because we live with ourselves every day.

The world notices.

The marketers notice.

The algorithms definitely notice.

The algorithm knows things about me that I haven’t admitted to myself.

It knows which products I browse.

Which articles I read.

Which videos I watch.

Which topics keep my attention.

It has quietly placed me into a category.

A middle-aged male worthy of daily mail solicitations from AARP, Beltone Hearing Aids, and Mutual of Omaha.

Professional.

Homeowner.

Probably interested in grilling equipment.

Likely researching knee pain.

Potential customer for expensive mattresses.

The algorithm has essentially become my mother.

It worries about my sleep quality and wants me to eat more fiber.

And honestly, it’s not entirely wrong.

What surprised me most was realizing that not being the target customer isn’t necessarily bad.

When you’re young, you spend enormous amounts of energy trying to fit in.

You follow trends.

You buy certain brands.

You wear certain clothes.

You care deeply about what other people think.

Then something interesting happens.

You get older.

And eventually you stop caring quite so much.

Not completely.

Just enough.

The freedom is remarkable.

I no longer feel obligated to understand every trend.

I don’t need to know every celebrity.

I don’t need to chase every new app.

I don’t need approval from strangers on the internet who think a fifteen-second video qualifies them as philosophers.

That is not surrender.

It is perspective.

One of the great benefits of getting older is learning the difference between what matters and what merely demands attention.

The two are rarely the same.

Many of the things marketed most aggressively today will be forgotten tomorrow.

The products.

The trends.

The influencers.

The controversies.

The outrage of the week.

The viral sensation that everyone insists is changing the world.

Most of it disappears.

Life continues.

The older I get, the more I appreciate things that last.

Friendships.

Experiences.

Family dinners.

Books.

Conversations.

Places with history.

Businesses that still answer the phone with a human being.

These things rarely trend.

Yet they endure.

Maybe that’s why realizing I wasn’t the target customer anymore didn’t bother me as much as I expected.

It felt less like rejection and more like graduation.

The world is always chasing the next generation.

It should.

Every generation deserves its turn.

Every generation deserves products designed for them, entertainment that speaks to them, and opportunities to make the culture their own.

That doesn’t diminish those who came before.

It simply means the spotlight moved.

And that’s okay.

Eventually today’s trendsetters will discover the same thing.

One day they’ll stare at a commercial and wonder who it’s for.

One day they’ll hear a popular song and feel completely disconnected from it.

One day they’ll download an app and immediately become annoyed by whatever absurd process replaces passwords.

The cycle continues.

The target customer becomes the former target customer.

The center becomes the edge.

The new becomes the old.

The old becomes the experienced.

And if we’re lucky, we learn to laugh about it.

So yes, there was a day I realized I wasn’t the target customer anymore.

It wasn’t dramatic.

It wasn’t tragic.

It was simply one of those quiet moments when you look around and recognize that the world has continued moving forward.

The funny thing is that once I stopped worrying about whether the world was designed for me, I started enjoying it more.

I don’t need every product to be aimed at me.

I don’t need every commercial to speak my language.

I don’t need every trend to make sense.

The world belongs to younger people for a while.

Then it belongs to someone younger than them.

That’s how it has always worked.

Besides, if the algorithm wants to keep showing me advertisements for grilling equipment, comfortable shoes, and premium coffee subscriptions, I can’t honestly say it’s completely misunderstood me.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped being the target customer.

And strangely enough, I think I’m perfectly okay with that.

~Ryan Gartrell is currently old enough to remember when phones were attached to walls, but apparently young enough that every website still wants him to create an account.