| The rapidly approaching retirement of the baby boomers is a change in a huge market segment that should be anticipated by marketers. Retirement is a life transition that necessitates new life roles for the retiree, and renegotiation of some roles within the family. Continuity theory predicts that, over the long term, husbands and wives will continue their roles pretty much the same from pre-retirement through the transition to post-retirement, but it allows for changes necessitated by the life course. Reassignment of household tasks such as shopping or purchasing household goods and services is a potential area for such changes.; The present study examines whether or not retirement affects family purchase processes by altering or mitigating the gender roles of husband and wife in several ways. Potential effects at each of the five stages of the family purchase process are examined: problem recognition, information search, decision/choice, purchase participation, and post-purchase evaluation. Effects of agreement or lack of agreement between the product gender and person gender role are included. Finally, retirement is viewed not only as an event, but also as a process, taking place over time. This results in examination of the retirement transition period, a period during which family purchase processes are disrupted before settling into long-term retirement assignment of family purchase process roles. This study is also the first to study the effects of women's retirement on family purchase processes.; The study finds evidence for both gender roles in the family purchase process and for the retirement transition period, a time when existing purchase process roles are changed as recent retirees try out new roles. Both husband and wife participation in family purchase processes seem to change with retirement. Both seem to reflect greater autonomy during the transition period and more joint processes post-transition than pre-retirement. In addition, there is evidence of reduced market participation, post-transition. This reduced participation is known to marketers, but troubling. The study finds, consistent with previous literature, that strictly comparing retirees to pre-retirees often masks both the effects of the transition period and effects of post-transition retirement. |
