Ageism in Birthday cards
A Workshop with UK Greetings staff
Since the Better Birthdays campaign went live in August 2022, we have been meeting with people and organisations in the UK greeting card industry to raise awareness of ageism and to promote the concept of pro-ageing birthday cards.
Arising from one of these meetings, we were delighted to be invited by the Product Director at UK Greetings to run an online workshop about ageism in birthday cards for their staff.
UK Greetings is one of the major players in the UK greeting card industry and brokers the card displays in the main supermarkets and retail outlets such as Sainsbury and Tesco, as well as supplying others and 2,500 indies.
Our key takeaway message from running this workshop with staff is that it confirms our experience that general awareness of ageism is low. This has been demonstrated through our surveys and discourse with members of the public. This is especially true of realisation of internalised ageism and how it influences our outlook, behaviour and decision making.
This was the case with the UK Greetings staff and the fact that cards reflect social norms.
However, it was so inspiring how quickly people “got it” and responded accordingly, noticing ageism’s pernicious appearance in cards and how they might create cards that alter our stereotypical attitudes to ageing and reference age differently, with humour, but in a celebratory way.
This experience concurs with a recent report by The Australian Human Rights Commission Changing perspectives: testing an ageism intervention, that shows that a brief, one-off #ageism awareness session can be highly effective in shifting people’s attitudes.
About 50 people attended the workshop on 16th June 2023, and participants were a mixture of creatives, as well as product, category and HR staff. The workshop set out to be a two-way interactive dialogue that was an experiential and an enjoyable exploration of ageing and ageism in birthday cards and a search for pro-ageing birthday cards.
The workshop followed this structure:
* We started with a presentation about the serious impact of ageism on people's wellbeing, how it shows up in our culture and how ageism isn't just focused at others, but also internally.
* Then we explored how this relates to birthday cards and what we have learned about the public experience of ageist birthday cards. We shared our journey to date with the participants, in particular “What we have understood from our conversations with the card industry,” and insights from our survey.
* In the final section of the workshop, they had a chance to reflect on the differences between cards which mock age and those which celebrate it and, even better, subvert stereotypes about it. For this section we used interactive Jamboards to capture their thinking.
We highlighted some indications of an emerging market for pro-ageing cards in terms of current age and ageism awareness such as the #Ilookmyage social media campaign launched in June, encouraging staff to consider the future - What opportunities might there be for UK Greetings?
By all accounts the webinar was well received and considered thought provoking. It certainly developed our relationship with the organisation and hopefully will help in encouraging the design of pro-ageing cards.
However, this sums it up the current position …
We need for there to be more action to highlight the implications of internalised ageism amongst older people. Also for a more unified pro-ageing brand for people to ask for cards that celebrate ageing, there isn’t a consumer consciousness of what to ask for… YET!
