Resource: Profiling the Baby Boomer Brokerage Client

I'm a baby boomer, and to celebrate that accident of birth, I put up some time back an online collection of music videos from my generation to feed my nostalgia for those good old pre-CDO days. My visitor traffic to that blog is nothing to brag about; less than a thousand pageviews and much less in terms of unique visitors, on a good month at that.

When you consider the large population of baby boomers around the world, that's a puzzling figure. I put that one up precisely because I knew we were plenty, and in this age of YouTube, true-blue boomers would probably want to watch, and not just hear, past live performances of their favorite bands and groups, given the chance.

As I was going through the Wall Street & Technology blog yesterday, however, I stumbled upon a study on baby boomers, which I thought could shed some light on the dismal visitor traffic to my music blog. Admittedly, what I found there is, at best, indirect and I may be making a mountain out of a molehill. Still, it gives some interesting insights into baby boomer behavior.

A 2005 U.S. Department of Labor study had defined baby boomers as persons born between 1946 and 1964, which consisted of two distinct sub-groups: the Older Boomers, born from 1946 to 1954, and the Younger Boomers, from 1955 to 1964. Many of them dabble in stocks and bonds, so the Aite Group recently did a survey intended to determine "how they like to receive brokerage financial statements and prospectuses and to what extent they would like these to be paperless." Here are the findings of that survey:

1. On Brokerage Statements-

- Not eager to receive online statements; prefer mailed paper statements.

- 66% acknowledged they have the option to receive online statements, but 57% of those who can have chosen not to.

- Of those who opted not to receive online statements, 75% said they like paper statements and 17% said they don't trust online statements (another 4% said electronic statements are too much work).

2. On Brokerage Accounts-

- Like the idea of aggregating brokerage accounts (to consolidate monthly statement), but they don't want to give up passwords to do so.

- 52% not likely to provide multiple passwords to have their financial information aggregated.

- Only 3% are willing to provide passwords.

3. On Mutual Fund Prospectuses-

- 26% never read prospectuses.

- 38% read a few.

- Only 13% read all of them.

- 51% likely to read short version prospectuses that were two pages or less.

With regard to the latter finding, if only short version prospectuses were sent out and the long version, made available only on demand, the Aite Group estimated that printing and mailing costs would be significantly reduced by 65%, from $100 million to $35 million, this year. Here's the best part: Using the short-form prospectus would save nearly 39,000 trees and 128 acres of forest annually. I didn't realize it's that substantial.

But going back to where I started, what can I make out of this Aite study in relation to the light visitor traffic to my music video blog? If the stereotypical baby boomer pictured in this study prefers mailed over online statements, and a two-page or less summary over the complete prospectus, do I think he'd be savvy enough to do a Google search or visit music video blogs? Ask me another question.

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