Most brands will tell you they serve everyone. They talk about inclusivity. They talk about connection. They talk about meeting people where they are. But behind the scenes, in the quiet rooms where strategy decks live, there is an unspoken truth. Brands draw invisible age lines. They decide who they want and who they do not. They decide which ages feel aspirational and which feel like a liability.
I’ve hit the age. I’m not one hundred percent sure what that age is, but I know I’ve hit it. I’ve been quietly moved from one brand list to another. How do I know? Did someone from Brand Central arrive at my house with a card? No. It was much more drastic than that.
It started with a rough bout of insomnia that pushed me into late-night pancakes and even later-night TV. The pancakes were good for the soul and bad for the pants. The TV is where the brand shift became clear. Years ago, when I couldn’t sleep, the commercials were for adventures, shoes that promised better adventures, resorts where those adventures came lacquered with liquor, and people leaping off cliffs into glowing blue water. I’d sit on my couch and think, I’m doing that. I’m going there. I’m wearing those. I am reborn.
Now the commercials have changed. There is still adventure, but only if you keep an eye on your blood pressure. There are still products that promise to make life better, but now they revolve around getting more fiber in my diet so my adventures can happen in the bathroom. At some point, without realizing it, I became too old for certain brands and was reassigned to the older people’s catalog. Walk-in tubs instead of swim-up bars. Chairs that lift you upstairs instead of chairs by the pool at a tropical resort. Sticks that help you balance, instead of sticks used to knock coconuts from trees. The brands that once said get up and go now tell me sit down, stay cozy, and poop better.
Which raises a question I can’t shake. How does this happen? How does a brand know when parts of its audience have aged out of its attention? Should that even happen? Do brands decide we’re too old for their products, their clothing, their language? Do they decide when we stop belonging?
How and why do brands age us out?
Brands and the Unspoken Age Ceiling
Most brands will tell you they serve everyone. They talk about inclusivity. They talk about connection. They talk about meeting people where they are. But behind the scenes, in the quiet rooms where strategy decks live, there is an unspoken truth. Brands draw invisible age lines. They decide who they want and who they do not. They decide which ages feel aspirational and which feel like a liability. They choose who they picture using their products and who they picture fading into a different category.
They will never say this out loud. They don’t have to. You can see it in their models, their voice, their channels, their story. You can see it in the commercials that show twenty-year-olds jumping off cliffs and none that show fifty-year-olds feeling the same spark. You can see it in the sneakers that are marketed as symbols of youthful rebellion, even though the people who can finally afford them are well past the rebellion stage. Every brand makes these choices, whether intentionally or out of habit.
The strange part is that brands rarely notice when they age someone out. It is not a dramatic decision. No one stamps your forehead and says you have reached the upper limit of our interest. It happens quietly. The brand keeps speaking to the younger version of you, long after you have changed. The story stays frozen at a life stage you no longer recognize. You look up one night at two in the morning, watching commercials about stair lifts, and realize the brands you grew up with have stopped seeing you.
This is not always malicious. Sometimes it is just a byproduct of how marketing is built. Demographic targeting is clean and predictable. Life stages are not. People age unevenly. Some fifty-year-olds still jump off cliffs. Some twenty-five-year-olds are already shopping for walk-in tubs. Brands prefer clean segments because they’re easy to brief and to buy media for. But people do not live in those boxes for long.
When brands draw these age ceilings, they also create something unintended. They create a moment where the customer feels quietly removed from the story. Not rejected exactly, just no longer pictured. And that feeling lingers. It signals to the customer that the brand is moving on, and they should probably do the same.
Which raises the next question. If the customer has not left the brand, but the brand has aged the customer out, who is actually walking away first?
The Problem With Treating Age Like a Category Instead of a Continuum
The real issue is not that brands think about age. They have to. The problem is how they think about it. Age gets treated like a neat category with fixed edges. Eighteen to twenty-four. Twenty-five to thirty-four. Thirty-five to forty-nine. Fifty and up. These brackets might make sense on a spreadsheet, but they do not reflect how anyone actually lives.
People do not wake up on their thirty-fifth birthday and lose interest in skate shoes. They don’t turn fifty and suddenly want an adjustable bed. Life does not shift in clean increments. It moves in uneven waves. We age in some ways and stay young in others. We grow up in our decisions but not always in our desires. We become more responsible and more nostalgic at the same time. None of that fits into a demographic box.
When brands treat age as a category instead of a continuum, they miss the complexity of real human change. They assume interests expire at the same rate as warranties. They assume adventure belongs to one bracket and stability to another, and that once a customer crosses an invisible age line, they no longer want the emotions the brand once promised them. They stop speaking to the person’s identity and start speaking only to the person’s birth year.
This creates an uncomfortable mismatch. The customer stays emotionally connected to the brand, but the brand has shifted its gaze to the next cohort waiting in the wings. The brand keeps talking to the twenty-five-year-old version of its audience, while its real audience is forty and still very capable of wanting excitement, challenge, style, or novelty. When the story no longer matches the person, the person slowly drifts away.
There is also a deeper psychological cost. When a brand stops seeing a customer, the customer feels it. Even if it is subtle, even if it is never said out loud, people form relationships with brands that last for years. Sometimes decades. These relationships shape memories, milestones, and identity. So when a brand ages someone out too early, it doesn’t just lose a sale. It breaks a relationship. It tells the customer they no longer fit the world the brand imagines.
The irony is that people do not age out of identity. They age into it. They know themselves better and understand what they care about. They have more clarity and more purchasing power. They aren’t less valuable to a brand. They’re often more valuable. But because the demographic model says they belong in a different bucket, the brand lets them slip away.
This is how brands lose people who would have stayed loyal for life. Not through failure, but through neglect. Not because customers stop wanting the brand, but because the brand stops wanting the customers.
What Happens When Brands Age Customers Out Too Early
When a brand ages someone out too early, the impact is rarely loud. It shows up in small ways. A commercial that suddenly feels aimed at someone else. A product line that no longer lines up with how you live. A shift in tone that makes you feel like you wandered into the wrong room. None of this is dramatic, but it adds up.
The first thing that slips is the feeling of connection. Not loyalty in the marketing sense. More the quiet sense that this company still gets you. That you still belong in whatever world they’re building. When that fades, it doesn’t happen in a single moment. It wears down the way old jeans wear down. You look at what the brand is doing and feel a slight distance that wasn't there before. You stop checking new releases. You stop assuming their next thing will be for you. The brand keeps talking, but it doesn’t sound like it remembers you are in the audience.
There is also this odd thing that happens when a brand walks with you through different chapters of your life. Without trying, it becomes part of the background. Shoes you wore in college. Bags that made it through your first real job. Products you associate with certain people or certain places. When a brand stays with you, it ties those memories together. So when the brand suddenly turns its attention somewhere else, the thread snaps. You feel the gap right away. It is not heartbreak. It is more like driving past a place you used to visit and noticing the sign has been taken down.
And then there is the practical side. Many customers who get aged out have more stability, more spending power, and a clearer sense of what they want than the younger audience brands often chase. They are not less valuable. They are often the ones willing to pay for quality, for craft, for something built to last. Yet brands sometimes treat them like a phase that has passed instead of a relationship that could have deepened.
There is a dignity element too. No one wants to feel quietly pushed toward a slower, softer version of themselves before they’re ready. People don’t age in sync with the stereotypes brands rely on. Someone in their fifties might still want fast shoes and ridiculous trips. Someone in their twenties might be shopping for comfort. Life doesn’t move in the neat lines brands draw, and people feel it when a brand decides they no longer fit the picture.
The consequences are subtle, but they are real. When a brand ages customers out, those customers drift away with a mix of disappointment and clarity. They know when they are no longer being seen. And once they go, they rarely come back.
The Tension Between Brands That Stay Frozen and People Who Keep Moving
One thing that often gets overlooked is how differently brands and people experience time. People keep changing. Sometimes slowly, sometimes all at once, but we move. We pick up new habits, drop old ones, shift our priorities, and rediscover parts of ourselves we forgot about. Even when we feel stuck, we’re still drifting toward some new version of who we are.
Brands, on the other hand, tend to freeze themselves. They land on an image or a tone or a type of customer, and they hold on tight. Not because they are stubborn, but because it feels safer to stay in the lane that once worked. The risk of trying something new feels bigger than the risk of repeating the same story. So the brand stays still while the audience moves on. And eventually, there is a gap between the two that wasn’t there before.
This gap is where things start to feel off. A person might still like the brand, still feel some connection to it, but the brand feels stuck in a younger photograph of the customer. It keeps talking to the twenty-five-year-old version of someone who is now forty, fifty, or sixty. It keeps pushing the same adventure-heavy story to people who might still want adventure, just not in the same way they used to. The brand hasn’t done anything wrong, exactly. It just hasn’t kept pace with the people who made it relevant in the first place.
You can feel this when a brand’s voice doesn’t grow up. Some brands talk as if their only audience is a group of hyperactive interns on a sugar rush. That tone works for a while, then it starts to feel thin. People get older. Their humor shifts. Their attention shifts. The brand’s voice stays trapped in the year it launched.
There is also the opposite problem. Some brands flip so hard into an older demographic that they forget their customers still have curiosity and energy. They assume the moment someone crosses a certain birthday, they lose interest in anything that looks even slightly bold. So the brand becomes overly safe, overly gentle, overly careful. Customers notice that too. It feels like being wrapped in bubble wrap when all you wanted was a pair of shoes that didn’t talk down to you.
The real tension is this. People evolve. Most brands don’t. And the ones that do evolve often do it in sudden jolts that confuse the very audience they are trying to keep. There is rarely a steady conversation between who the customer is becoming and how the brand chooses to grow.
If more brands paid attention to that moving target, if they treated the customer’s life as something that keeps unfolding rather than something that fits into a neat bracket, far fewer people would wake up one day and realize they have been quietly moved to the other list.
Brands That Refuse to Age Their Customers Out
Every so often, you notice a brand that behaves differently. They don’t freak out when their customers get older. They don’t suddenly change the script or shove people into a new category. They just stay with you. Not in a grand, look-at-us kind of way. More in a quiet, of course, we’re still here way. The brand shifts a bit as you shift, and the whole thing feels less like a handoff and more like a long conversation that never needed to stop.
Nike is a good example. They talk about athletes, but they don’t limit that to people who can sprint up a hill without pulling something important. They treat movement like a lifetime thing. You can be fifteen or fifty and still feel like you’re part of the story. You don’t age out of wanting to feel capable, and they don’t write you out of the picture just because your knees make more noises than you remember.
Some outdoor brands have this figured out, too. They don’t pretend everyone is cliff-jumping or free-climbing a face of rock. They show people who hike at whatever speed they hike. People who camp the way they camp. Folks who just want to be outside and feel good doing it. The pictures aren’t all twenty-something catalog models dangling off ropes. You see a mix of ages, and it feels honest. It feels like the outdoors actually looks.
Then you’ve got companies that design products in a way that doesn’t force you into feeling young or old. Certain skincare lines do this well. Some tech brands, too. The product doesn’t judge you. It doesn’t wink at you. It doesn’t try to talk in whatever internet dialect is trending. It just works. It fits into your life without making you feel like you’re trying too hard or not trying enough.
What these brands share isn’t some secret marketing trick. It’s that they pay attention. They notice that people don’t age in a straight line. They don’t make assumptions about who still wants excitement or comfort or style. They let customers keep being themselves, however that evolves. And because of that, the relationship doesn’t collapse the minute someone crosses into a new decade.
It’s not nostalgia that keeps people around. It’s recognition. It’s the feeling that the brand didn’t leave the room while you were still talking.
The Future of Age Fluid Branding
A lot of brands could hold onto people longer if they stopped treating age like a set of boxes on a form. Most of us don’t move through life that cleanly. We grow in odd directions. We stay the same in ways we didn’t expect. Some parts of us feel older, some younger, and none of it shows up the way a marketing chart predicts. Age just doesn’t behave the way the models say it does, and people feel the difference when a brand sticks to the model instead of the person.
The brands that get this right won’t build a new identity every time their audience blows out more candles. They won’t talk to twenty-year-olds like one species and fifty-year-olds like another. They’ll build a world people can grow inside. Something flexible. Something that doesn’t make you feel foolish for wanting adventure later in life or comfort earlier than expected.
Voice plays a big part in this. Some brands talk like they’re trying to keep up with a group chat full of teenagers. Others swing the opposite way and sound like they’ve retired from having opinions. Neither approach holds people for long. But when a brand sounds like someone who has actually lived a bit, someone who understands more than one stage of life, the tone fits a wider range. People can settle into it without feeling pushed out.
Design matters too. Not everything needs to scream energy or whisper fragility. There’s room right in the middle where things feel clear and confident and not tied to any particular age. People of all ages respond to that because it doesn’t trap them in a story that isn’t theirs.
And on the product side, this is even clearer. A good product doesn’t care how old you are. It just works. It feels right in your hands. It fits into your life without making you feel like you’re pretending to be younger or older than you are. When a product is built with that kind of neutrality, people stay.
The opportunity here is bigger than brands realize. People are living longer and changing more times throughout those longer lives. There’s no single look for forty or sixty or anything beyond. The lines have blurred. A brand that understands that will end up with customers who stick around, not because they’re nostalgic, but because they feel seen in the present.
Age isn’t the thing that drives people away. It’s the way brands treat it.
What This Means for Creative Teams
If brands want to keep people instead of quietly losing them to the next demographic box, the shift has to start with the folks who make the work. Designers, writers, strategists, founders, all the people shaping how a brand shows up in the world. Age fluid branding isn’t a campaign. It’s not a tagline. It’s more of a mindset, and it starts inside the room where decisions get made.
For writers, this means paying attention to how the voice feels, not just how it sounds. A voice that tries too hard to be young will push people away. A voice that assumes everyone is slowing down will do the same. The sweet spot is a tone that feels lived in. Curious. Clear. Not breathless and not brittle. Something people at different stages can recognize as real.
For designers, it’s about resisting the urge to swing between extremes. Not everything needs to look like a festival poster. Not everything needs to look like medical packaging, either. There’s a middle space where design feels grounded and confident. Not trendy. Not timid. Just honest. People of all ages respond to that because it doesn’t tell them who they’re supposed to be.
Strategists have their own role here. Age shouldn’t be the main lens for understanding an audience. It can be part of the picture, sure, but it’s not the whole story. Look at what people value, how they live, what they’re moving toward or away from. These things tell you far more than a birth year. If you build a brand around those deeper truths, the audience won’t age out of it because those truths travel with them.
And for founders and leadership, the work is pretty simple. Keep an eye on whether your brand is growing up at all. Not aging in a tired way, but maturing and getting clearer. More grounded. More aware of who your customers have become instead of who they were when you started. Brands that never evolve end up stuck in their own past. Brands that evolve too fast leave their people behind. The steady path in the middle is where loyalty lives.
The heart of it is this. People don’t want to feel like a brand has outgrown them. They also don’t want to feel like they’ve outgrown the brand. If creative teams build with that in mind, the relationship doesn’t have to break every time someone hits a new milestone.
Age isn’t what makes people drift. It’s that feeling of not being seen anymore. When a brand lets that happen, the relationship thins out. When a brand pays attention and keeps showing up as its customers change, people tend to stick with it. Not out of loyalty in the formal sense, just because it still feels like a good fit for the life they’re actually living.
The takeaway
At some point, all of us notice when a brand stops seeing us. It’s rarely dramatic. It’s a quiet drift. A slight shift in tone. A product that suddenly feels meant for someone else. And once you notice it, you can’t unsee it. You realize the brand moved on without telling you.
It doesn’t have to work that way. Brands don’t need to trade one age group for another, like they’re rotating stock. People don’t age in straight lines, and the relationship between a brand and its audience doesn’t need to either. The brands that hold people the longest are the ones that grow a bit as their customers grow, not by chasing youth or leaning into age, but by actually paying attention to what people want as they move through different moments in their lives.
At ThoughtLab, this is the part we care about. Building brands that aren’t afraid to evolve. Brands that talk to people in a way that still feels right ten years from now. Brands that make room for the whole arc of a person’s life instead of just the first few chapters.
Age isn’t what makes people drift. It’s that feeling of not being seen anymore. When a brand lets that happen, the relationship thins out. When a brand keeps showing up as its customers change, people tend to stay. Not out of obligation. Just because it still feels like a good fit for the life they’re living now.
