The New Emerging Consumer Segment: The Cranky

I’ve been accused of being cranky.

Turns out, I might not be alone. I could be part of a whole segment of cranky consumers. Some evidence:

• Cranky.com. Eon’s new search engine designed specifically for aging baby boomers. (#1 search term: “sex”, #9: “arthritis”).
• MrCranky.com. Movie reviews with a rating scale that starts with “almost tolerable” and goes down from there to “so godawful that it ruptured the very fabric of space and time with the sheer overpowering force of its mediocrity.”
• The Cranky Product Manager. A blog from the “the fictional, snarky alter-ego of a mild-mannered software product management professional.”
• Cranky Middle Manager. An “irreverent but insightful look into the world of middle management.”
• Cranky Literary Journal. A journal with a “tendency toward quirky writing — work with an unusual or ever-so-slightly skewed perspective. Ironic, but not always, because every so often we have a moment of utterly sincere sentiment.”
• The Cranky Professor who says he (she?) can be “emailed by carefully retyping without the spaces and with a substituted symbol for the word ‘at’ and punctuation mark for the word ‘dot’ at professor at crankyprofessor dot com. If you, too, were a professor you might understand WHY I go into such detail.”

And the list goes on.

John Todor at The Perfect Customer Experience said “I commend [cranky.com’s] effort to launch the first age-relevant search engine but I hope they lose the name and more importantly, lose the negative premise.”

I think they’re on to something. I can relate. After all, with 78 million baby boomers out there, not all of us can be happy and cheerful.

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