Examination of Witnesses (Questions 460
- 479)
TUESDAY 8 MARCH 2005
8 MARCH 2005Mr Mervyn
Kohler, Mr Steven Sadler and Mr Robert Diamond
Q460 Chairman: Which leads me to
wonder whether companies should not be required to have a non-executive
board member with a particular remit in this area, but that is
perhaps facetious.
Mr Diamond: An interesting idea.
Mr Sadler: Good morning, My Lord Chairman,
my name is Steve Sadler and I am the Technical Director of Tunstall
Group. Perhaps I could make two observations with regard to your
question: one is that we actually design and manufacture products
of various kinds for older people and vulnerable people, but even
there, in that specific category, what we find is that the requirements
of the products are often influenced by people other than the
older people themselves, so it might be the buyer, it might be
the intervening authority. If you look, for example, at today's
telecare market, as it has been branded, which has developed from
the old social alarm market, the vast majority of social alarms
for community care were specified and had standards set for them
by local authority procurers of one form or another—housing
authorities and social services. In other words, if you have people
making decisions and specifications on behalf of older people
it does not necessarily get you the product that is right for
the older person—sometimes it does, sometimes it does not,
so there is that issue. The second point I would make is that
in our industry we design and manufacture, but we also integrate
other people's products. For example, my colleague made reference
to mobile phones, cordless phones and so on, and what we find
is that very, very rarely are those products targeted at older
people specifically. My belief is that there is a very simple
economic reason for that, that those suppliers optimise products
for what they see as their core market initially, and that core
market very often precludes the very young and the very old, it
is looking at that central affluent age range, mobile phones being
a prime example. It is almost not until you start to exhaust those
core markets do people start to move into the adjacent markets
as they would see it, and certainly we see it therefore as almost
a timing effect as much as a lack of interest. Those varied products
which are better suited to older people tend to appear later in
the lifecycle of that type of technology. I offer those comments
to you.
Q461 Chairman: If I could address
both of you, Mr Diamond and Mr Sadler, the question that occurs
to me is how much market research is done in respect of communities,
and do you actually talk to older people as part of that market
research, or do you just take the core market that you, Mr Sadler,
were talking about—if people are affluent this is the kind
of thing they will want, as distinct from affluent with certain
digital skills or whatever?
Mr Sadler: If I could pick that one up
first, for me there is quite a bit of research that goes on with
the user base. Whilst various sessions and focus groups and other
activities are run with older people we do see a dominant effect
driven by the buyer and certainly, in our market, that has been
driven by an intervening authority, usually a public sector person.
I suspect that market still is rather skewed, therefore, in favour
of the buyer rather than the end user.
Mr Diamond: From a marketing perspective
the research is rather sadly self-selecting, in that one of the
first things you do when placing research is choose which target
group you wish to research amongst and then, by definition, you
get a skewed result. In our experience we have been involved in
two commercial initiatives by large manufacturing organisations;
interestingly, both of them called Project Phoenix, completely
independently of each other, which intimates people rising from
the ashes, so in evolutionary terms rather the wrong way round
I would have thought. In both those instances they actually went
out and researched the needs of an older audience, and I think
it is a trend that is becoming increasingly prevalent amongst
brand organisations. Rather than looking at the opportunity of
any ageing population, they are rather fearing the impact of an
ageing population, so for one of the manufacturers they happened
to be in the business of marketing deodorants and other personal
care products, and one of the fascinating facts is that your need
for anti-perspirants and deodorants diminishes over 50 which means,
if that is your business, you are in trouble because your population
base is ageing from beneath you. In that instance some organisations
are making special efforts but, to be honest, the mainstream of
their budgets is focused absolutely in the heartland of the buyer
who, for many consumables, is perceived to be the rather stereotyped
mother in her mid to late 30s with two children trailing around
behind her in the local supermarket, and that is who they research
among.
Q462 Lord Turnberg: The question
I was going to ask has been answered, at least in part. As I get
older I find I am less and less interested in the advertisements
that are around, and those that are I am less and less convinced
by, so I suppose the older one is the less easy it is to convince
someone through advertising that this is the thing they have to
have, which must make it difficult for the advertising industry.
I suppose the aged are fortunate in not being responsive quite
so much to advertising, but nevertheless there are large numbers
of products which should be available to the elderly, but I suspect
there is a gap—I suppose that is why you have set up your
grey group. What can be done? How can Mr Sadler sell his products
better to an audience which is likely to be more critical of the
gorgeous blue and red adverts?
Mr Diamond: We have spent quite a bit
of time looking at this. Our starting premise is, fundamentally,
that you have to educate the manufacturers of products and services
as to the commercial opportunity available. Ours is a fairly simple
business, which is that we are at the receiving end of other people's
investment in marketing, therefore we have to be responsive to
their needs and to the degree that we can educate them around
where other marketing opportunities lie. We do not have a social
agenda, ours is a purely commercial agenda. There is some fairly
direct learning about marketing messages and propositions that
resonate more with an older audience, and they are all rather
warming: it is about presenting people with the facts in a clear
and compelling manner, it is inviting individuals to make their
own choices about which product is better than another product.
Here too you get into a discussion about which medium you are
using to communicate with, but it tends to be rather richer messages
in terms of deeper content, so typically products that are marketed
to older consumers tend to be presented in the print medium or
in the radio medium rather than necessarily the fast soundbite
and high cost of television, although the generalism does vary
by product. Certainly, though, there are different cues which
do appear to be relevant to older consumers when they are receiving
marketing messages and making their own decisions based on them,
and they are very different to the accepted ways of mainstream
marketing and advertising.
Q463 Lord Turnberg: Is there a big
gap there?
Mr Diamond: When I set up the Grey Matters
unit I thought there was a huge gap, ands three years later and
quite a bit of money down in investment I am not quite sure how
big the gap is. Certainly, when we go round speaking to brand
owners—and we work across almost all consumer sectors that
you can imagine, from technology to automotive, to consumer goods
to travel retail—everybody nods and looks at the numbers
and is academically interested about the ageing population, but
they then go back and do what they have been doing before. As
I say, the only brands that I think have responded in any major
way have viewed the ageing population as a major commercial opportunity,
or a major threat, and have therefore taken active steps to engage
with older consumers.
Mr Kohler: May I add to that, please?
I think there is something in the observation that the conventional
way of getting messages across to the public seems to have less
impact on the older population, and the examples I will give you
are all from the public services. We still have something like
two million pensioners in this country entitled to pension credit,
which they are not claiming. There have been adverts on television,
they have been written letters and all this kind of thing, yet
for some reason or another—there is free money out there—people
have not responded and have not claimed their benefit. You could
say the same thing about a number of the programmes to improve
people's heating systems and things of that nature; look at the
resistance from the pensioner population to the withdrawal of
pension books and their replacement with smart cards. There are
still, probably, about a million people out there who have not
got a bank account for their pension to be paid into. There is
a gap, therefore, in terms of effective communications with older
people which I think affects not just the commercial world but
the world of Government as well.
Q464 Chairman: Mr Sadler, do you
want to come in as well?
Mr Sadler: Just coming back to the point
about who is making the decisions, if we look at how we could
perhaps improve the marketing to older people, one way of course
is to make sure that the proposition we are delivering is one
that appeals directly to the end user. If you look at the example
of the traditional social alarm market, which I have referred
to already for our type of product, that was very much "This
is a product that I am going to give you because you need it;
it is not what you want, but I am making the decision that you
need it." Those propositions have changed over time so if
you look at today's telecare technology, it provides other things
such as intruder monitoring, bogus callers, reminders to take
your medication, in other words things that should appeal to you
directly as an end user, you can make your own informed decision.
So I think one issue is that we have got to make the proposition
properly appeal to that older user. The other point that I feel
quite strongly is the question of trust. We are talking very generally
about people with a great deal of experience behind them, they
have seen these things come and go, have they got a perception
that what is marketed and sold usually delivers the outcome they
expect? Not always, so there is a question of trust there, and
if I try and relate it to our own experience there is this issue
of the channel by which that proposition gets to the end user.
To give an example, if you take our products, you can send out
lots of leaflets, you have television campaigns, but universally
those have failed because they are alien to that older community;
if the product is taken to that older person through a trusted
channel, however, a local authority for example, someone they
know, or with a strong brand name, or a blue chip company, that
very often works. The example that springs to mind, is the work
at West Lothian in Scotland where the council themselves were
offering a product, technology and services—it happens to
be our product but there are lots of others—to people over
60, and the take-up they have had is remarkable. They have 10,000
households with people over 60, and currently it has been taken
up by about 1,700 people, so 17 per cent. Anyone in the commercial
industry would be very pleased with that sort of take-up. My personal
belief is that it is there because they have a good, strong council
with a trusted record; a private sector company would not have
achieved the same degree of success.
Chairman: That is very helpful, thank you. Lady
Emerton.
Q465 Baroness Emerton: Thank you
My Lord Chairman. Having listened to what has been said already
it seems that there is, indeed, a problem of education, and I
think Mr Diamond mentioned that it is education not only of the
older people but also perhaps, dare I say it, of marketing managers
and marketing personnel. Following the conversation we have had,
can you identify any specific actions, for example the formation
of a trade association, that might help to accelerate the development
of companies' products and markets which would be targeted at
the older consumers, who would be educated themselves towards
those objects, because I think that point has been made in terms
of the trust that is required by the older person.
Mr Diamond: If I understand your question
correctly it relates to whether some form of education or some
sort of trade body should be set up.
Q466 Baroness Emerton: Or both.
Mr Diamond: I had a note of it before
we came in today, and I think it is a very interesting proposition.
Without a doubt, this is a discussion topic which requires further
debate and further education, both amongst consumers—who
probably have debates on a daily basis with their friends about
the irrelevance of advertising—and amongst the people who
produce that advertising who rarely have the debate about where
is the population going, where is the wealth within the population
going, what is the impact of an ageing population on dependency
in terms of a working population having to support an increasingly
large base of retired people? Whether a trade body is the right
way or not I genuinely do not know. I think the concept of more
direct research and subsequent education amongst marketing practitioners
has great merit. I certainly know that for Haymarket Conferences,
which is one of the largest organisers of conferences for the
marketing community, their annual Older Richer Wiser conference
is consistently sold out and has the highest attendance of any
of those commercial conferences. Clearly, therefore, people are
looking for further information. There seems to be a gap though,
which is the provision of information through conferences and
trade bodies and then the take-up by commercial organisations
in terms of drawing senior consumers into their commercial plans.
It is interesting that you rather lightly suggested that potentially
there could be a non-executive director involved in certain companies
who actually champions certain cases; I think that is a very interesting
proposition because I think that fundamentally when you look at
the ageing of the population and some of the wealth statistics—and
there seems to be some confusion or dispute over the wealth statistics—it
does suggest that more people are getting older and most people
have more money, certainly in terms of assets and retained saving,
though it is less true in terms of disposable income. What does
need to happen is that there needs to be a debate at board level
within a lot of organisations, which need to challenge their marketing
directors and their commercial teams on fundamentally are we almost
following yesterday's business model and should we be considering
where our industry is moving forward. The right platform for that
I genuinely do not know, because it is quite a complex issue.
Q467 Baroness Emerton: Do you think
it might be an issue that should be taken up in the basic educational
programme of marketing?
Mr Diamond: I think so, absolutely, in
as much as the stalwarts in the marketing community—and
there used to be a lot of marketing training programmes—I
started 17 years ago with Proctor & Gamble who are rather
famous for their marketing programmes, and they taught an impressionable
21 year old how to market to housewives with children; I see no
reason why they could not take the same individuals today and
educate them about marketing to a 50 or 60 year old married couple,
who have some money to spend and are very happy to invest in various
products and services. I think it is just a fundamental lack of
both awareness and also an increasing issue of what an ageing
population really means in the UK.
Q468 Chairman: Or, alternatively,
how to market to middle-aged children with older parents.
Mr Diamond: Absolutely, and I think that
the dual dependency of looking after ageing parents and young
children is an increasing reality, and I think that that could
actually be the trigger that pushes this dialogue and discussion
onto a broader spectrum.
Mr Kohler: My Lord Chairman, there is
no particular rocket science involved in designing a world for
older people; we are talking about issues to do with diminishing
sight, diminishing hearing, diminishing strength, those sorts
of issues, and there is information out there for manufacturers
if they actually chose to use it. One of my favourite anecdotes
is of the concept car which a Japanese manufacturer put together
about 15 years ago, looking to the older driver of the future.
This had features like a head-up holographic display on the windscreen
so that you did not actually have to look down at the dashboard,
and things like that, prismatic mirrors, swivel seats, radar-assisted
parking, push-button handbrake, all these sorts of features. They
never moved to market a car like that, presumably because they
do not actually perceive at the moment that there is a purchaser
base to make it worthwhile, but the answers are there.
Lord Turnberg: And a good seat, not one on the
floor.
Lord Soulsby of Swaffham Prior: My Lord Chairman,
this document we have just had, I am not going to infringe on
any other questions if I pursue it?
Chairman: Pursue it, yes, indeed. This is the
paper from Help the Aged.
Q469 Lord Soulsby of Swaffham Prior:
Yes, I think so, it is about the designing and marketing of industrial
and commercial products. Might I be bold enough to say that I
do not think sufficient attention—indeed any attention in
fact—is paid to some of the things that you have mentioned,
Mr Kohler, like eyesight going, hearing going, strength going.
So many things, like the instructions on packaging, are often
in print that is unreadable unless you use a magnifying glass.
There is far too much information, surely one can abbreviate that
into a readable form for the older person. Pharmaceuticals in
childproof bottles—you have to get a child to open it because
some of the older people cannot do it, and so on. It does seem
to me that no attention has been paid to people of 75 or 80 or
over because it is the inability to use these very simple things
that causes trouble to older people. One other grouse I have is
that of young people on the telephone speaking far too rapidly
so that you cannot understand what they are saying; there should
be some instruction that if you are speaking to older people you
should slow down so that people can in fact understand what they
are talking about.
Mr Kohler: You are absolutely right.
It always staggers me that we see something like 40,000 people
admitted to accident and emergency departments every year who
have injured themselves trying to get into domestic packaging
of one kind or another, using an inappropriate implement in an
inappropriate way. There are all sorts of different trade-offs
which do actually constrain the whole process. Pharmaceutical
products, for example, come with pages and pages of small print
because that is what they are required by law to actually produce
and show what the product is exactly. In that pages and pages
of script, the simple instruction about how you actually take
the stuff probably gets, relatively speaking, lost. There are
all these sorts of considerations; one of the food products which
always causes a lot of concern is peanuts, when you really do
have to have an applied skill to actually tear the foil at the
top, but that is the best way of keeping a peanut fresh, so the
peanut manufacturers to whom I have spoken tell me.
Q470 Chairman: Thank you very much.
Do you want to come in, Mr Sadler?
Mr Sadler: Maybe we come full circle
back to the point about the representation of the end user, whether
you do it through awareness or the appropriate training. I would
suggest that there are quite a few trade associations already
out there and whilst I love your idea of having a non-executive
in every single company representing the older person's interests,
it might be quicker to target some of the trade associations and
ensure that they are working to the right code of practice. My
own organisation, for example, is party to such an association
and I suspect even there they are not properly represented with
an older person's representative.
Mr Diamond: One recent positive step
in this direction has been, as I have observed through going around
and seeing different brand manufacturers, the implementation of
the recent Disabilities Discrimination Act, where people have,
by law, been revisiting largely their websites. It is now quite
common to go onto an internet site and you see a button saying
"If you would like this in larger typeface, please click
here." That concept, while it is extremely complex to implement
through other media, whether it is packaging or the instructions
on how to take a product, has narrowed which is that people should
have choice, if they are visually impaired or if they would like
to be, when on the telephone, treated in a certain way, and there
should be provision for that to happen. The Disability Discrimination
Act obviously is more regulation and we would much prefer a self-imposed
way of working with organisations to recognise that some people
do have difficulty in hearing and so on.
Q471 Lord Soulsby of Swaffham Prior:
If I may come back for one moment, My Lord Chairman, you mentioned
the internet and websites and computers, but not everybody has
in fact got a computer and not every aged individual knows how
to work a computer. The thing that would be adequate for a teenager
or a 20 or 30 year old is no longer applicable for an older person;
they are frightened of computers and it is no use saying go on
the web and find it, because they (a) do not know it, or (b) do
not have a computer to get on the web in the first place.
Mr Kohler: There is a hugely important
point underlying what you have just highlighted there, and that
is that as the majority of goods and services increasingly become
marketed through the web and information is disseminated through
the web and things like that, we do risk really marginalising
a large chunk of our older population, and I think that is a serious
concern across the whole of the social policy field.
Mr Sadler: It is very interesting, there
was a large European study, going back probably three or four
years now where all these issues about how we represent goods
and information to older people were discussed—it was called
Safe 21. The one point that sticks in my mind is the strong view
that if you are trying to provide information and assistance to
that older person living in their own property, you should be
using familiar instruments around the home and, even at that stage,
we were very much embedded in the internet but the recommendation
was to use the television, use the telephone, use the informal
carer coming to the door rather than some interesting but new
technology. I think an interesting prospect that we might look
at for the future is of that these things do converge, so when
we turn off analogue TV broadcasting and we get complete digital
broadcasting to the TV screen, you will have access to lots of
information in context, which looks very much like a familiar
instrument, where you can scale the text, you can change the representation
on the screen. I think that should provide a very interesting
challenge for exactly the problem we are talking about today.
Q472 Lord Broers: Unfortunately,
I missed the visit to the Tunstall Group which I would have much
enjoyed, but are you involved in that subject of simplifying the
internet, for example? I am aware that there are several manufacturers
in the world who are not so much targeting old people as targeting
the Third World and just targeting the economics of the situation,
so there will be a very simple internet access machine that is
not a computer, you just turn it on and the internet comes up.
Mr Sadler: That is right.
Q473 Lord Broers: Then you turn it
off and the internet goes away, so there are no clever computer
skills required. Are you involved in that?
Mr Sadler: I think that is very much
a key point of interest for our technology. If you look at where
technology is today, the proposition has moved on from you must
have an alarm to let us provide functionality that helps, and
I have mentioned intruder, bogus callers and all these sorts of
issues that are the very logical next step. Let me explain one
particular issue: when you have done all these things it is largely
about supporting independent living, taking away risk, helping
to provide a safety net for living in your own home. The concern
I have is that once you have done that, of course, you have often
assisted in some form of social isolation because you have that
person living in their home, often on their own, albeit trying
to access information on health and social care. Video links to
family members and so on is very strongly suggested to be the
next step of the technology. To me the next step is very much
more the interfacing of that telecare world to those normal instruments
I talked about, and the obvious one is the television. Our interest
is very much in linking that alarm world to this new set-top box
world to provide social information and assistance on the TV screen.
You can imagine a whole host of those services which we can only
speculate about today, but will be delivered via that mechanism.
Q474 Lord Broers: I hope it will
be very straightforward. The trouble is we fear and dread these
extra set-top boxes, and we all know the most common item in our
homes is the table full of remote controls, and nobody knows which
one does what. I am a real advocate in this environment for a
very simple, straightforward single interface, and if the internet
could be provided as just another channel on the television set
it would also perhaps be something that people could handle.
Mr Sadler: I agree with you entirely.
The simplification is not just for the older generation either;
all of us would benefit from easier access mechanisms to this
information, and when it is presented on a TV screen you are not
going to be interested in playing around with the mouse and all
these technical issues you have with a PC, so inevitably the next
steps will integrate and simplify products in that environment.
Lord Broers: My Lord Chairman, if I may also
speak on a slightly different topic, I declare my interest as
an old non-executive director of Vodaphone, and I would say that
this phone problem is being tackled. Vodaphone is about to announce
a product with nice big keys, that is just a phone and is not
a camera and a golf swing machine and everything else you can
imagine.
Chairman: Lord Turnberg wants to come in and
then we must move on to Lord Drayson.
Q475 Lord Turnberg: Just one point,
one of the drivers for all of this would be the commercial benefit
to the companies, I suspect, but surely the company that produces
an easily-opened packaged will have a commercial advantage over
all the others that produce unopenable packaging. Cannot that
message be got through? I am surprised companies do not do that,
they could make it their point: our packets are dead easy to open.
Mr Kohler: Your statement is so self-evidently
true it is hard to actually work out what is going on here. I
suspect it does come down to trust. If we stay with the packaging
work for a moment, a reasonably easy to open closure unit on a
package of liquid, a fruit drink perhaps, or milk, something of
that nature, costs a few marginal pennies but it is a highly competitive
market where price is really important when it is sitting there
on the supermarket shelf. Maybe that odd penny or two is our problem.
Lord Turnberg: I find that hard to believe.
Q476 Lord Drayson: I would like to
probe this issue a bit further actually, because we have heard
evidence from a number of sources about this failure by industry
to meet what is clearly a growing demand caused by this accelerating
demographic change towards an older population, so I really want
to try and get to the bottom of why is industry failing to do
this, because industry does not usually fail to meet a market
opportunity. Is it because there is a failure of technology or
is it a failure of marketing? You touched on this already, but
I would like to probe it further: is it this lack of willingness
or understanding or preparedness to actually understand this particular
market sector, or is it a failure of design and technology to
be able to develop products which as well as being effective for
your 30-something family with young children is also easily-opened
by someone in their 70s or 80s?
Mr Diamond: Can I attempt to answer that,
certainly from a marketing perspective, and I am just going to
draw on a paper which I authored last year with Professor Merlin
Stone who is the IBM Professor of Relationship Marketing, which
was called "Why Isn't Marketing Taking on the Over-50s Consumer?"
We highlighted five reasons which I hope from a marketing perspective
will answer that question. The background is that the big number
that is quoted in the marketing community is that the over-50s
consumers in the UK hold 80 per cent of all assets, 60 per cent
of savings and represent 40 per cent of disposable income, so
from a ruthlessly commercial perspective one would think that
that makes them a very, very attractive proposition. We highlighted
five potential reasons why marketing is not taking on the challenge—these
are all hypothesis-based I should say. The first is a hypothesis
that actually the wealth statistics hide the fact that the majority
of accumulated wealth amongst the over-50s is very disproportionately
held by a small number of the over-50s group—fundamentally
it is held in illiquid assets, and when we talk about why are
we not designing new consumer products packaging for an over-50s
population, in almost every consumer product that you can think
of the money is still with high volume, which tends to mean large
family units, and that is one of the reasons why. It also suggests
that if the majority of this wealth is locked up in property,
in pension funds and so on, the wealth statistics might be somewhat
misleading, and that in practice the 80 per cent of all wealth
that is held by the over-50s cannot be easily accessed. The second
reason—and I alluded to this earlier—is around the
idea of an over-50's, a senior's mindset, no longer being valid.
Everybody rolls out either Mick Jagger or Jack Nicholson as a
role model—whoever thought that would happen—for describing
the idea of you used to be a pre-50s, then you hit 50 and suddenly
everything went downhill, and you certainly see a lot of research
and verbatim quotes suggesting that is no longer the case. The
third I have already alluded to, that appealing to the over-50s
will alienate the mainstream, and certainly with the large budget
brand owners we have had very open dialogues about if we are seen
to have older consumers in our advertising, will that alienate
younger consumers?
Q477 Lord Drayson: If I may just
interrupt you there, what was going on with Dove then?
Mr Diamond: Dove is a very interesting
example, and I should state that Unilever is one of my clients
and we work with them on the question of targeting the over-50s
consumers, and then also I, as Diametric, was quoted in The
Times commenting on the Dove advertising campaign. They are
being brave and they are being bold, and brave and bold sometimes
lead to a marketing breakthrough in the commercial results, but
often they do not. What Dove is seeking to do is differentiate
itself from an extremely competitive marketplace by saying that,
essentially—and I think this is a great comment on the beauty
myth as we age—you should look the best that you can look,
rather than if you are 60 you should try and look 20 or if your
skin is this colour you should try and make it another colour.
They are taking a fairly challenging approach and I am not party
to their business results, I do not know whether it has been justified
in terms of results. Interestingly, they have challenged a number
of preconceptions about gender, about age, about physical shape
and they have taken a very bold approach; personally, I like it
but I do not know how the consumer at large has responded.
Chairman: It is very interesting, it is actually
an Aristotlean approach rather than a Platonic one, but I dare
say they had not thought of it in those terms. Aristotle: everything
is good of its own kind, which is precisely what they were doing.
Baroness Hilton of Eggardon: They were not looking
for the idea, were they?
Q478 Lord Drayson: Moving off the
marketing issues then to the technological issues, how much is
it a failure of attitude and vision of the engineers in designing
new products? I am particularly thinking of the way in which technology
is having a greater impact on all of our lives, so those who are
40-something and grew up with the use of personal computers are
going to be much more computer-literate as a generation 15 years
from now. How much work has been done on just how much more expensive
it is to design a mobile phone, or a computer, or a car, which
is as useable by someone who is 70 as it is by someone who is
30, so you do not necessarily market it as a car for the over
70s group, but you make sure that everyone from 17 to 70 can effectively
use the car? Is it about the specification that is put to the
engineers in terms of the type of group, or is there actually
evidence that it is more expensive—you mentioned the problem
about packaging—to develop a product which is as useable
by that older population as it is by the more able, young?
Mr Sadler: Inevitably there is a mix
of all those issues in there. Even if you look at our market—which
is targeted largely at older people—if you look at the designers,
they are still very much in the 30s age bracket and I see time
and again errors of omission and commission on their part where
they have not taken into account the use by older people. They
continually have to be reminded to have the right interaction
with the end users, to use the right specification to get back
to the point about that particular market, so there is that side
of it. The other thing we need to remember is that they tend to
work primarily to the specifications that they are given, and
then we come full circle back to the marketing element again,
because certainly in all the industries I worked in in the UK
and across Europe, the activity was very much driven to the specification
of a market product manager, and if that market product manager
has a particular belief in his core market, that will drive the
outcome. Unless that person and his colleagues are aware of the
adjacent markets and the different end users, they will not feature
in the end product. At Tunstall we have deliberately targeted
those end users, so maybe we are not as bad as some, but even
there you can see those issues coming forward. For a general consumer
product I can easily see how that might come about, that you are
not tailoring it to older people for example. Maybe one way to
view this is if you look at the people involved in the chain of
delivery of a new product, yes, you are a designer in your 30s,
but as you move through the various management ranks, whilst you
maybe retain some influence, by the time you have got a real appreciation
of older people's needs through direct contact with your ageing
parents or family members, you are not at the coalface any more,
you are not the one writing the software or designing the piece
of plastic. It relies on another mechanism, somehow you have to
get that back into the design team, and there is a conscious effort
to do that. It goes back to the point made earlier, that it is
about awareness and training.
Q479 Lord Drayson: It is finding
a mechanism whereby people can really use an in depth understanding
of that more aged population, possibly because they are that generation
themselves, and getting them engaged in the specification process
and the design process of the product. You feel that that would
lead to some positive change in the direction we want.
Mr Sadler: That is right. If you look
at the guidance facing a designer today—including the people
we use as well—the documentation and the guidance for older
people and more vulnerable people and how you design for them
is there, but you have to go and look for it because it is not
mainstream education. If an engineer walked in off the street
with his PhD, it is very unlikely that he will have faced the
detailed user needs of some of those client groups, so he will
have had the grounding, he knows how to design an electronic product,
to write software and so on, but he will usually not have a detailed
appreciation of what it means for a disabled user or an older
person. It will take some initiative on the part of the company
to do that and maybe that is where you need the non-executive
influence or the trade association influence to instil that as
a later phase of training and education.
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