Targeting older people with technical products: the first of an occasional series

I have a confession to make. I’ve just bought a Brennan JB-7, finally succumbing to the ad that has been appearing for some years in Private Eye. A Brennan is a combined CD player and amplifier, the size of a hardback book, which stores up to 5000 CDs digitally. This makes it very easy to find and to play anything from your CD collection, without lots of plastic CD cases lying around.

My assumption is that the Brennan is targeted at people aged over 50, who have some disposable income (it will cost you from £266 to £540) and who love music. They are probably male and have accumulated a lot of unsightly CDs over the past 25 years or so. This is relatively easy to infer from the media schedule, the ads and the website. If you are not familiar with i-tunes, Spotify, music streaming and the like then discovering the Brennan will be like discovering fire, or the wheel.

However, the problem for Brennan, I suspect, is that many of this older audience are very familiar with such things, limiting potential audience size significantly. All the data we have seen tells us that although older people are less likely overall to use technology such as mobile phones and the internet, this is no more than an average. Within the 20-million-plus people over-50, there are some very heavy users and early adopters of technology – the important variables being class, education, income and occupation (not age). Professional middle-class men aged 50-64 are very heavy purchasers and users of ICT, for example. And to many of them, the Brennan is likely to come across as a clunking and outmoded piece of kit – a bit like a brick-size 1980s mobile phone, say.

This brings us to the product. Within the parameters it defines, the Brennan delivers exactly what it promises. It is, as it claims, unique in what it is – but not in the problem it solves. If you still can’t use a VHS player, you will certainly find the Brennan a challenge. However, to the more up-to-date itunes user, the functionality of the Brennan will seem complex, dated and limited to many. And to transfer your itunes library to the Brennan, you will have to find, download and use software of your own choosing in order to convert the files.

When you finally come to play the Brennan, after the tedious uploading process, the sound quality is very good, although the volume is unlikely to disturb the neighbours. It’s easy to find albums and tracks –as long as you remember that they’re there, as there is no ‘library’ to consult. And memory is not something that improves with age, sadly.

There are a number of positives. I am now able to play most of my music collection (itunes aside) in the living room, without fiddling with an ipod and without the clutter of CDs. The press ad provides an absolute master-class in direct response advertising: it made me believe that this was the best solution to a problem I didn’t really know I had – even though it probably isn’t.

However, after-sales service is a mixed bag: excellent support (for example, in answering questions) but a badly devised, written and designed product information booklet which starts with the product in mind, not the user. A constant theme in these reviews, I suspect, will be the poor quality of written product information – something of great value to many of us older people.

There is undoubtedly a market for this product and 10,000 units have already been sold, claim Brennan. However, one can’t help feeling that the Brennan JB7 is a product rooted in the past rather than the future: its primary rationale is to do with storing CDs, a medium which is in steady decline. I await the new-generation internet-enabled Brennan with baited breath – if not the laborious transfer of all my music to it that will be involved.