Constructing third age eHealth consumers by using personas from a cultural age perspective

Abstract

Society ages and our already extensive use of a host of different portable devices continues to expand. No leap of the imagination is needed to grasp that an exponential growth of the eHealth market is at hand. While the ageing of the baby boomers will have an impact on the global economy as a whole, of particular interest is the impact this will have within the context of eHealth market development. We wish to clarify and raise the level of awareness about how older age identity is constructed in the marketer-consumer dialectic within the eHealth context and how the personas method can be used from a cultural age perspective. Our focus is on the process of third agers becoming eHealth consumers. We present an analytical framework for future studies aiming to an-alyze eHealth offerings. This will allow us to gain insight into the process of constructing the third age eHealth consumer group’s identity through multimodal communicative acts, as is the case in advertising, or in settings requiring interactivity, such as the service design process. It is through these multimodal acts that new eHealth offerings could be marketed to the third age eHealth con-sumer, focusing especially on both the written and visual language used. Our approach is meant to offer an alternative to studies in which ageing has mostly drawn upon the chronological age concept and where marketing has not been seen as a discursive practice shaping consumers’ identities.