We are Perennials—Why Agelessness is a Mindset Says Gina Pell
Show Snapshot:
Serious question. Is age a number or a mindset? In 2016, Gina Pell, a creative director and serial tech entrepreneur, had had enough of dated labels that stuck people in generational boxes (Boomer, Gen X, Millennial). She coined the term Perennials to describe ever-blooming people of ALL ages who continue to push up against their growing edge, always relevant, and who are not defined by their generation. Now Gina, who is the Content Chief of The What List, an addictive newsletter and a vibrant online community for curious people, joins me to talk about why age is irrelevant, how to stay ever-curious, and why online communities are an antidote to the isolation of this never-ending pandemic. Plus, she shares her newest, keep-calm find.
In This Episode We Cover:
1. What’s a Perennial? And what made Gina coin this term?
2. Why are marketers obsessed with Millennials? And why do so many brands market to people solely on their age versus their interests?
3. Gina’s early dotcom career as a tech entrepreneur and the genesis of The What List.
4. Why your fifties can offer calm and a respite from the pressure to hit the career milestones of your thirties and forties.
5. Why being Perennial is ageless, defined by curiosity and a growth-mindset.
6. How to read a book a day and great books on Gina’s radar.
7. Building and nurturing a vibrant online community.
Quotable:
Perenniality is all about exploring the unknown and seeing what's possible. And that's really scary for some people.
I myself have never seen the world through a lens of age--even when I was a child.
Snackable Smarts:
Perennials are ever-blooming people of ALL ages who continue to push up against their growing edge, always relevant, and who are not defined by their generation.
Gina coined the term after experiencing the frustration of trying to work with brands who solely wanted to reach Millennials. She and her co-founder launched The What List to surface eclectic finds for curious people – they were targeting consumers by interests, by mindset, not by age.
If top technology companies target consumers based on clicks, based on behavior, why are so many marketers choosing to only target consumers based on birth year?
Perennials rejects dated-age labels and the confines of generational boxes – to be a perennial is to have a spirit of curiosity and agelessness.
Nurture your curiosity through The What List, a social community and addictive email newsletter, which surfaces five eclectic, curious things you need to know every week—from wellness to books to beauty, style, travel, and tech.
Word of Mouth. Gina’s Pick.
The book Breath. That's what we're really into right now, by James Nestor. That is a book that we stumbled across about how to breathe. And I think really learning how to breathe and lower your stress level is extremely important during COVID. Lowering this stress level, but also strengthening your lungs.
More Resources:
Gina’s Meet the Perennials article that went viral.
The WHAT List website
Subscribe to The WHAT List newsletter
The WHAT Facebook
The WHAT Instagram
Books Gina recommends:
Non-Fiction:
Fiction:
Transcript
Katie Fogarty (00:03):
Welcome to A Certain Age, a show for women on life after 50 who are unafraid to age out loud. I'm your host. Katie Fogarty.
Midlife has a big, fat vocabulary problem. I'm not just talking about words like "readers" and "ma'am," which keep popping up and can make you feel, well, old. I'm talking about the entire way we define the process of aging, lumping people into boxes like Boomer, Gen X, Millennial, as if your birth year inextricably tethers you to a specific demo, and those are your people: period.
I'm joined today by a woman who is shaking up our dated way of defining age. Gina Pell coined the term "perennials" to describe, "ever-blooming people of all ages. People who continue to push up against their growing edge, who are always relevant and not defined by their generation." Gina is both Perennial #1, a serial entrepreneur, and co-founder of The What, which is an addictive weekly newsletter surfacing what to have on your radar and a vibrant online community of over one hundred thousand Perennial women. She's here today to talk about why age doesn't define us, but why the company you keep might. We'll also talk why online communities like The What are an antidote to the isolation of this never-ending pandemic, plus she'll share some of The What finds you don't want to miss. Welcome, Gina.
Gina Pell (01:24):
Hi Katie.
Katie (01:24):
Thank you so much for joining me today from Sausalito. As someone who writes for a living, I absolutely love the word "perennials" because who doesn't want to be ever-blooming? Tell me why you coined this term and how you've managed to interject it into the zeitgeist.
Gina (01:40):
Well, it actually, it came out of frustration and anger, which is kind of funny. I was pitching an idea to some CMO in New York and it's somebody that I've known throughout my whole career. I started in digital marketing about 20 years ago and she asked after she heard our pitch, she said, "Is your media company focused solely on millennials?" And I said, "Well, no. We really go after more of a mindset." And she said, “Well, our KPIs —our key performance indicators— are all geared towards millennials for the next five years. And if you're not solely focused on them, then we can't do business with you anymore.” So, I was really frustrated.
I came back to San Francisco and I wrote an article called Meet the Perennials. A lot of why I wrote the article and wanted to define a new moniker for a mindset and not a generation, is because I just thought of the top technology companies in the world, they target you based on your clicks based on behavior. They don't target you based on your birth year. And why should we continue to think of ourselves as Millennials or Gen X or put ourselves in a box of age. So, that's kind of where it came from. Coming up with the concept of perennials —because I never, I myself have never seen the world through a lens of age— even when I was a child. So, I always liked speaking to adults or people outside of my age group. And so, that's kind of where it came from. That was the catalyst that made me write the piece and it really took off.
Katie (03:27):
I know because it's been everywhere. I think I first saw it in Fast Company a few years ago. And then I learned more about you and your work and started following the what and, you know, fell into the rabbit hole of your newsletter, which is such a fun read every week because you share amazing finds, things that we should know about. But do you think that marketers have changed since you put this out there and then kind of help reframe the fact that we shouldn't be thought of as a specific generational cohort, but we could be thought about and advertised to and connected with and spoken to as people who have interests? Have you seen a change or is it still very rigid and focusing on Millennials or Gen Z?
Gina (04:12):
I think we're starting to see a change in marketing across the board, not just in terms of age, but also in terms of who they're featuring. So, featuring more people of color, different genders, not just male, female. And certainly, I see a lot more silver-haired people in ads than I ever have seen before. So, one of the first ads I noticed with Charlotte Tilbury, that's a makeup brand, an amazing makeup brand. Actually, Charlotte Tilbury helped design a lot of Tom Ford's collection and she's an English makeup company, high-end makeup. And she had a campaign that featured a woman who was probably between 50 and 60 years old, next to a woman who was a model that was like 20 years old. And it was an everyone campaign.
In the very beginning when I…so, when I wrote this, this article made the perennials and I really didn't think much when I was writing it. I was just thinking, you know, I'm frustrated. I'm gonna write this little blog piece on Medium. I had no followers on Medium at the time. And I linked to it from my own newsletter. And then my husband linked to it from his newsletter. He writes a newsletter on the news called Next Draft, and just was with our two newsletters linking to my little piece that had no likes, no followers, Fast Company picked it up right away. I got a call from an editor in Norway. We wanted to translate the article in Norwegian and pay me for it. Do you understand that nobody pays for content in America? Sure. I'll take the check for $600.
Katie (05:49):
Nice.
Gina (05:50):
And I think I struck a cord about this idea of relevance. So, if we've been marketed to, based on generation from the beginning of marketing, I would say if you're not in that golden age group of like 18 to 24, 24 to 35, then you're just out of the limelight and the media is not interested in you. Marketers are not interested in you. I've heard a lot of women say that it's such a relief to be in my fifties because I just don't get any attention anymore. I'm just, you know, I just kind of have disappeared.
Katie (06:35):
Wow. That's so wild. I mean, first of all, I don't... Disappear in a good or a bad way?
Gina (06:43):
Well, some women think in a good way, that they don't get the attention, that they're out of the gaze, the male gaze, or just having to feel like they have to compete for eyeballs.
Katie (06:56):
Got it.
Gina (06:57):
You know, I certainly don't feel that, I don't feel that way… I just would love to, you know, disappear. That's for sure.
Katie (07:06):
There are so many sexy women, over 50 look at J. Lo, she's like a unicorn of a human. She's just stunning and glowing and lit from within, but there are so many, you know, I'm 51. And I feel like I've still got it.
Gina (07:24):
You're a foxy chic.
Katie (07:24):
At least my husband says so, and that's all that matters. He's smart. He's smart enough. He knows…
Gina (07:34):
He's got great taste.
Katie (07:34):
Exactly. He knows where his bread is buttered. Gina, how old are you?
Gina (07:38):
52.
Katie (07:38):
52. And do you feel different about being 52 at 52 than you did it say 42?
Gina (07:47):
I feel a lot calmer. I think the difference between 52 and 42...I also feel like I don't have…when I was in my twenties, I always thought of this big milestone in my thirties being this deadline. I looked at my thirties as a deadline. Like, I have to be on the track towards some magical goal. Like, I don't know when I'm going to find my career, find my path. You know, I remember having this existential crisis, like around the age of 29 and my in-laws were just laughing at me when my husband and I would go over to their house and lie down on the couch.
Katie (08:30):
Yeah.
Gina (08:31):
First of all, they're Holocaust survivors and they're also extremely successful. They're just like, “Why don't you just do something?” Because we would just sit around. I was turning 30 and I had just, I was just starting to leave a multimedia company. And the web was just starting to happen. Like, the web was really just starting to come up around the time when I was about to turn 30. So, being a content chief was not even a career back then or being in the web. Being a very early dot-com entrepreneur. That wasn't even in the cards back then. Nobody even knew what that was. And so, yeah. We were 29; we're sitting around angsting. By the time we were 40, we had done a lot in the dot-com world. We created companies. We invested in companies. We felt pretty settled, by the time when 40 rolled around. But then we, now we're panicking that we were going to become irrelevant.
Katie (09:32):
Right. It just disappears like in a puff of smoke. So, tell us about what you were building and doing and your thirties and forties because I know that The What is not your first rodeo. You've been inventing and building and scaling other companies. Fill us in.
Gina (09:48):
Yeah. So, my first company was called Splendora and I started that company in 1999 back then there was no Yelp. And there weren't a lot of websites online when I started, I think there were fewer than a million websites online when I started my company. And there were only a few websites catered towards women. So, there was, I think there was women.com and another big one, but there really wasn't anything for us online. And I decided to launch a company that would become like the CitySearch for women and that was called Splendora. So, I raised money. I raised a million dollars pretty effortlessly because that was in the wild days of dot-com era. You know, barbecue.com raised $30 million.
Katie (10:32):
Wow.
Gina (10:33):
Yeah, exactly. I raised a million dollars. And then the very next week, as I was signing the closing papers, the headline of The New York Times said the dot-com bubble burst. I even thought about returning the money that had just hit my bank account because everybody.... it was total free fall in San Francisco. It was such a panic. Everybody started moving out. Everybody started getting pink slips, massive companies were folding. And my business partner, Amy Parker, who's been my partner for almost 20 years, she said back then, she was like the most recent hire. And so she said, she's from North Carolina. And she goes, "Yall. This is such a good idea. We shouldn't go out of business. We should just keep going." And we —in order to stay alive— and I raised money on a digital-community-based-play. Here I was going to be this digital...so funny that I used the term, the comp of CitySearch, because that doesn't even really, it's not even relevant anymore.
And so, we switched to printing books, and instead of putting it on the web, we created a directory in print for San Francisco of all the places that you can go. And it was, it was a printed directory of what we had online and that's how we sold the ads in there. And we stayed alive for three years, switching from digital to print until digital came back in about 2004, 2005. And then we made an absolute killing for the next four years, just a total killing. Just going to New York and just sweeping money into our bucket. I love that the marketers in New York had no idea what this digital advertising thing was about, right? Because we were all creating it on the West Coast. And by the time we got to the East Coast, people started panicking like, "Oh my gosh, I need an online presence."
Back then Splendora, we ran the first digital ad for Dior. And it was, it was really a big deal for some of these blue-chip retail companies to get online. Because when we first started going to New York to pitch, I remember we went into Prada and maybe Marc Jacobs, I don't think so. I think it was Marc Jacobs, but there were a lot of companies, fashion companies that just felt like —they called it the dot-com ghetto— and they just didn't want their brand in this kind of janky environment. But that was the web back in the early 2000s.
Katie (13:19):
I remember that web.
Gina (13:21):
Oh, I remember that web. That web was kind of...there's kind of a return to some of that web. I mean, if you think of Google, when it launched, it was white page with a search box, which is just a Google. It was like that for a very long time. But there's something so comforting about that. I'm totally digressing, but it's just interesting to see what, how the world has changed in the last 20 years. For me as a digital entrepreneur, being on the web this whole time, it's been really interesting.
So, the fact that I wrote made the Perennials at the end of my forties after being like this kind of crazy person, like we were…the things that we used to do. We had no idea what we're doing. We were just these pioneering women galloping across the web. And by the end of my forties, when I kind of had to figure it out, we had built our company. We had sold our company. We had helped build another company, which was a video shopping company called Joyous. I was thinking back on, on my time on the web, and I was thinking about this idea of “perenniality”--things go away, they come back. You know, print-publishing was freaking out, and then it started to morph into digital publishing. Now digital publishing is in massive, massive trouble. And now we're going to morph into something next, right? And then, then we morphed into social. Social is starting to get into trouble. So, social is now leading to community. It's just been very interesting. And that whole cycle is a very perennial cycle.
Katie (15:02):
It's very cyclical. And what you're talking about too, but are the things that we care about haven't changed. It's just sort of the method by which we're accessing them have.
So, what made you launch The What? Did you intend it to be community, or did you intend it to be a newsletter or a hybrid? Tell us about The What.
Gina (15:19):
That's a good question. I actually was not even thinking about community whatsoever. I was thinking when we launched The What in 2015, my partner, Amy, and I, were really, honestly just thinking of a way to work together again. Because we had worked on the previous two companies and had the time of our lives. I didn't really know her when we decided to keep Splendora going and she was a hire, she was our biz dev director. And then over a period of five years running the company together, I made her my partner. And then we ran this next company together. And then we both went our separate ways after the second company and The What was really a way for us to work together again. And we also felt like there was a lack of content for us out there.
And it wasn't really, well, maybe it could have been based on age actually, now that I've come to think of it. Because when I went to go talk to Brian and Lisa Sugar at Pop Sugar, Brian was telling me, "All of our content is geared towards millennials." Now, Brian and Lisa are not millennials. We're all around the same age. Like they are, they are Gen X-ers like, maybe Lisa could be a millennial. I don't even know, but I know that Brian's a Gen X-er, right. So, we had all come up in this business together and Pop Sugar became a hundred percent focused on millennials in 2015.
Katie (16:45):
I find it so mystifying because when you think about the buying power and the educated, empowered consumer, that women are, it seems amazing to me that they're not being...talk about galloping over the web. They should be galloping our way, giving us what we need.
Gina (17:06):
And then Refinery 29, which was started by people our age, right, in their fifties. So, I also came up with the Refinery 29 people. And I know that Christine was the exact same age as I was when we started talking to Refinery 29. The thing is that you know, Refinery 29, they revamped to be all about millennials. And the reason why they did it goes back to the earlier part of our conversation, it's because all of the brands said, "We are not going to sponsor you unless you are focused on millennials." The reason why the brands thought that was because they were just looking at the data. And the data was saying that millennials represented the largest generation in the world, right? So, it's like, they're way bigger than Gen X, bigger than the Baby Boomers. But what they weren't thinking of, that's like throwing the baby out with the bathwater, like Gen X and Baby Boomers have all the money and we're still here, you know?
Katie (18:11):
And not planning on going anywhere. And to your point about…even if millennials...I'd have to look at the numbers, I don't quite understand that the size count of each one of these cohorts, but when you look at the life-span from like 50 to 80 in this sort of third-act stage of your life, it's an enormous range of time that you're focused on things that we might care about. Which is adulting, helping our children to adult, paying for college, retirement, caring for our parents, making all these buying decisions, still living vibrant lives, where we...we just already established that I'm still hot and sexy, right? So, I want to make sure that I'm getting the marketing that gives me, cosmetics, the lifestyle, the fashion. It doesn't go away. Has The What stepped into that breach? Tell us about that.
Gina (19:01):
Well, yes. The What is really cool because we've been serving our audience and we've been looking at who reads The What and The What has a very Perennial audience. So, we have readers ranging in age from 25 to 85. I mean, seriously, that's no joke. At first, I was looking at the numbers wondering, "Am I really seeing what I'm seeing?" But when you start from a place of agelessness, it's not about category or age, it's just really about interests. What do you, what are you interested in? But what is interesting...Many interesting things don't have an age attached to it, or a gender or a race. For instance, what I read about last week was James Nestor's book called Breath, and it's about breathing. And it turns out that a lot of us have been breathing wrong if we're breathing through our mouth, or if we're breathing in through our nose and out through our mouth. But nose breathing, there's so much research that supports nose breathing in terms of especially in times of COVID that your nose filters air coming into your body, it warms it and it filters it. So, you catch a lot more irritants, germs, bacteria if you breathe through your nose than if you just open up your mouth and breathe in and out. And you are able to retain oxygen longer, but it's things like this, right? It's like is that specifically for old people? No. Could young people benefit from it? Yes. Could athletes benefit from it? So, we were looking to create content was that wasn't age-specific or gender-specific, it's human-specific.
Katie (20:51):
Or because I think we touched on the...
Gina (20:54):
It's curious. Right?
Katie (20:57):
The spirit of curiosity, that's not age-specific. And I have met very, very, you know, 30-year-olds who are not curious. And feel very sort of stuck in their ways or are just not...they don't have the spirit of growth. And I know that you talk a little bit about how being a Perennial is to be up against your growing edge. How maybe having that growth mindset, which has sort of buzzy —and I don't know how you feel about that word— but what does growing or growth mindset mean to you broadly? And what does it mean to you specifically in your own life?
Gina (21:33):
Well, growth mindset came from the book Mindset. Gosh, I really hope I don't get this wrong, but it's Carol Dweck, the professor from Stanford who wrote all about growth mindset. It's interesting. I hadn't even read that book before I wrote my article on Perennials, but she describes a growth mindset of the attitude of constantly learning, growing, reaching, never feeling like you're dealt a fixed set of skills or that you lack possibility or opportunity, but that it's more of a self-selecting process. This growth mindset, that you can grow and you are responsible for your growth, whereas the fixed mindset, you might've encountered some people who go, "Oh, well, she was born to do that,” or, "She's a natural,” like there's some kind of natural innate talent, and if you don't have it, then you're not going to be able to do it." And yes, there are plenty of people, not everybody's a perennial. There are plenty of people who have a very fixed idea of what life should be like, and they're on a track to achieve it. And once they achieve it, they're in this holding pattern, like, “Okay, I got this.” I think that the people who are not Perennial and I don't blame them. There are many reasons why a person would not be Perennial or really be interested in that. And I think a lot of it has to do with security that for people who really are very uncomfortable pushing themselves out of their safety zone, maybe Perenniality isn't for them because Perenniality is all about exploring the unknown and seeing what's possible. And that's really scary for some people.
Katie (23:18):
I think it's scary for everybody at different points. But I know for myself, I've been able to push myself beyond things that I once felt to be limiting. And I think that at least in my experience, my age has made me more confident because my confidence grows from doing and trying. And it's like a muscle... if you're willing to be uncomfortable once, you're not so uncomfortable the next time, and then you really can nurture that so you blossom. How are you? How do you practice Perenniality in your own life?
Gina (23:54):
I read a lot. I'm kind of known for my, my insane reading habits. It's funny, I just put this link together when, during COVID, the more stressed I am, the more I read. So, when I'm reading my book a day and people always ask me how I do that, and I can tell you how I do that if you're really interested. Anybody seriously, anybody can do it. And I read fiction. So, it's a lot easier to read a fiction book a day than it would be to read a non-fiction book a day, just because fiction, you're kind of flowing with it and nonfiction, there could be a lot of graphs and charts and dates. And, you know, it's not as easy a read as fiction is or could be. I read a lot. I learn something — I don't plan it out, but I do learn something new, something pretty major once a year.
So, this year I'm learning how to sail because I read a couple of books on sailing this year that had sailing as a theme. One was Sea Wife which was fantastic called Amity Gaige. And the other one was The End of the Ocean by Maja Lunde. And so, I was in love with sailing. So, I signed up for sailing lessons and I'm learning how to sail. And this sounds like really First World problems or goals, but anybody can learn anything for free online. There are so many places to learn things now that are totally free.
Katie (25:36):
So many tools. One of my recent guests is an emerging screenwriter at the age of 60, after a long career in brand marketing, she was at Audible at one point. And she said that she learned a lot about screenwriting from YouTube. You know, we have Google. She said, "I like to see people talking. That's how I process and I learn." And she taught herself a lot about narrative structure and the three-act formula that's quite often used in screenwriting. So, I agree. You can teach yourself anything.
Before we move on, I want to hear about how you read a book a day, because I am a librarian's daughter. I read all the time, what you said about fiction, I really related to, because when I was younger, I remember saying to my mom, "I don't ever feel like I'm seeing words. I feel like I'm experiencing a movie," because when I read fiction, it feels so immersive to me. But I still feel that a book a day for me would be a big mountain to climb. Tell us more about how you do that because I'm really curious.
Gina (26:37):
So, I created a method that...I didn't mean to create a method. When I look back on how I'm able to do this, I guess I just kind of did it naturally. And I was very curious about how fast I read. So, I timed myself with four different books, reading first one page, then 20 pages, then 40 pages at a time. And seeing how long that took me and then averaging, doing the math to figure out how fast I can read a page. And it turns out that I can read a page, a page a minute pretty much. And I think I asked other people, I tried this with other people and it seems like that pace is not speed reading a page a minute. It could be a page, usually has about something like 350 words on it. So, it's not remarkable that I read a page a minute. And so, what I would do is I would just find the books, I wanted to read, see how many pages they were, trying to figure out if I, how long it would take me to read how many hours it would take me to read, and then find the hours. So, typically takes me about five hours to read a 300-and-something-paged book.
And so, the way that I read is I find two-hour chunks at a time, a minimum of two-hour chunks at a time to read. And I find the time to read. So, some people go, "Oh, I have no time to read," but that's because they don't want to take time from something else. And when you figure like how much you're watching TV.... also, I don't just read before I go to bed and doze off. I go get into bed around 9:30 if I know it's going to be a reading night. I read next to a clock. I read with no gadgets around me. That's the most important thing, no distractions, no distractions at all. And then I also read the very first thing in the morning when I open my eyes, I grab my book and I read it. I do this to prevent myself from reaching for my phone. I think that's the worst way to come into the world is by turning on your phone and looking at it. And so, I find that especially if it's a book that I love, to come into the world through a doorway of a book that you love is so much more peaceful and meditative than looking at your phone and seeing that measles is on the rise around the world. You know, I did that one time, like this week by accident, the phone was right there and it was going off. So, I just happened to pick it up. And so, that's what I do. It's like, you can find so much more time to read if you just have your book next to you. So, I have my book next to my bed. It was the first thing I have...
Katie (29:31):
That's such a beautiful way to start your day. I absolutely love that. The point that you made about you can find time for the things that you want to be doing. We can stop doom scrolling through the news, or I fall down an Instagram rabbit hole, and 45-minutes have elapsed, and it doesn't need to be that way. And the things that matter, that ground us, that light us up...we can, and should find time for. Have you been reading any kind of books during the pandemic that are helping? Because this is a rough period of time for everybody. The country's really under stress, the globe. Is there any kind of book that's helped you through this time? Because you obviously you've had a lot, we've had a lot of days of the pandemic and you do a lot of reading.
Gina (30:18):
I've read a lot... I think just reading in general, like reading anything has helped me. How I find my books, I mean, typically because I write a book review on The What list twice a year. I write my spring book review. And usually, there are about 20 to 30 titles that I recommend. So, to get 20 to 30 titles, I have to read a minimum of 60 books in order to even come up with 20 that I like. So, far I've read like a hundred and I can't, I don't even know how many books I've read, definitely more than a hundred. And I can't read a book a day for a sustained period of time. I usually have to stop and then rest for a couple of weeks, every four weeks. So, every month, I'll take another half a month off and casually read, and then I'll go back to an intense reading schedule again.
But I think just reading in general and finding your sources. So, I comb through all of the sites with the best titles. I go on Goodreads and I follow people whose taste I like. I find that Amazon surprisingly is pretty accurate at recommending. They're pretty good at recommending things that I would like based on the authors that I like. And so, that's how I find a lot of my books. But the reading has saved me during the pandemic for sure.
Katie (31:51):
I'm absolutely inspired. I've been reading, not at this clip, but this is going to make me rethink my calendar and how I prioritize. Because there are some things I've just let fall off and I'm going to take this spirit on. That if it's meaningful, I can prioritize it. And I should be starting my day with yoga, instead of thinking, I'm going to get to it at the end of the day. , You need to put it front and center on your calendar because it's one of the reasons why you get out of bed then because you have something to look forward to, which is amazing. And I did have a couple of times during the pandemic when I'd look at the phone and I would have to brace myself in the morning because the news was always terrible. So, best to start your day with something else.
The online community that you've built is sizable and dynamic. Tell us a little bit about how you've been nourishing that during the pandemic, because I think online communities are more critical than ever because it's harder to get that energy from interacting with people because our worlds have become, you know, sometimes I feel like I'm living on the head of a pin. My world has become much smaller than it was. I'd love to hear about how you're nourishing your community at this time.
Gina (33:03):
Right? So, our community, we have two communities, and our first, our biggest community is on Facebook and it's a private Facebook group called The What Women. And then within that group, there are probably seven or eight different subgroups based on city or on affinity group. And you had asked me earlier if we had planned on building content and community, and we had never thought about building a community, but after sending out, I think we had sent out maybe like 50 newsletters over 50 weeks. We started to reevaluate what we were doing. And we just didn't know if we were really reaching people other than just looking at how they clicked. So, we started this Facebook community and we started with the question of aside from sex, how do you experience pleasure? And we had so many responses.
There were only 150 personal friends when we started the group. And by the time we had driven home to our houses because we were meeting for lunch meetings, we had a thousand new sign-ups, women adding women on Facebook, just like adding friends on Facebook. And we were shocked and we had 60 responses to that question. And then later in the week, we had 300 responses to that question. It was so mind-blowing to us because we were always these one way, we were an outgoing message of your typical media company. Like, I put out the news; I put out what's interesting. Since then the community has grown to 24,000 women in the main group and probably 10-to-12,000 spread throughout the other groups. And women we used to very carefully tend to the community. We would write prompts like, "What are you thinking about today? Or what good books are you reading?" And now women are asking questions to each other every single day. Like I haven't been on there today, which is unusual. I'm usually on there every single day, but I go back on there and there are 40 more questions being asked for anything from it's, it's only a women's group. But the topics range from the quotidian. So like, "What kind of shampoo do you use?" To really deeply personal things about depression, about divorce and marriage, about sexuality. And it's just beautiful to see all of these strangers support each other and help each other through things and recommend things to each other. And so, the community has been very, very nourishing to us, it's also helped us get through the pandemic, watching the way these women treat each other and help each other.
And I'm really beginning to see how important community is like you were saying, you said, you feel like you're on the head of a pin, especially during this pandemic, because you're just not seeing, you're not coming in contact with a bunch of people anymore. It's really cool with our digital community, that we have 24,000 women in there who are just, we're seeing them talk to each other. And then if we feel like we want to talk to them and have a question, we put it out there and they answer it. It's really quite profound. And to see this all happen online when you think about a whole bunch of people being online, it sounds like the worst possible thing at like Facebook did not get a great reputation since 2016 for having a bunch of people online.
Katie (36:31):
No, absolutely. But these sort of closed communities, I'm in the few of them. I really do hear what you're saying, and I'm trying to remember the name of the woman who coined this term, "digital campfires."And I feel in these, these digital campfires exist and I'm in a few of them and there is such a supportive vibe to the space. And it's a chance to be together in ways that are being denied to us right now. And I do believe one of the silver linings of the pandemic is sort of what you're experiencing in your own Facebook group is the sort of collective humanity. We were all going through this experience together. Everyone's experiencing it differently, but there has been loss for everybody. Some more profound than others, fear and anxiety. There have been the pandemic silver linings, and it's, to me, one of the pandemic silver linings aside from extra bonus time with my kids, is seeing —which, by the way, is not always a bonus, but that would be one of my silver linings— but is seeing how so many of my business calls start now, "How are you doing? Where are you, what's going on in your community?" I've had conversations with people I would never have had back in February. The pandemic has literally changed the way, in my experience, the way we relate to each other. I see stuff online about people getting into fights about masks. I haven't experienced that. I've experienced the good stuff.
How do you, what do you see for the, what moving forward? Because the pandemic is still here. Are you looking to grow the community more? Are you looking to continue to do content? What is your vision?
Gina(38:14):
Our strategy is content and community. So, the community is the community. We draw the community to us with the content. So, the content that we put out there curates a certain type of person who'd be a Perennial person, right? So, there are going to be plenty of people who are not interested to hear what we have to say because they are not interested in this kind of Perennial content. They're not curious thinkers. So, I think what's really great for us is that we have the content to curate the community around it. I think community is going to be the next buzzword for brands. So, every five years you hear like the buzzwords, this is what brands are all about. You know, like maybe 10, 15 years ago, it was content marketing, content marketing. We have to build content in order to market our product. So, I saw somebody who did it really well. Actually, it was Equinox. Equinox built this really great site. I don't even know if it's still around, but it was all around health and wellness and this health and wellness lifestyle, fitness lifestyle. So, content marketing was really big. And it was all about content marketing and then it started moving towards, social —what’s your social strategy?
Now I feel like it's going to be, what's your community strategy? Because you can advertise all day long on Instagram and it's going to deliver for you. It's definitely going to give you a high ROI based on your spend, you're going to sell a lot of products based on how much you spend, but the second you turn off that spigot of dollars to Instagram, then how are people going to still rally around your brand? Where's the campfire, right? And the campfire is going to be in the community. So, I think that what's coming up next is that brands are going to be hiring community-builders. And my partner, Amy and I, are even thinking maybe it's time for us to write our book about how to build a community because we unwittingly built our community. And I feel like the magic of building our community was the fact that we had content that people already knew. Like I would join a community for Atlantic Magazine. Or for, I don't know, Nerds 'R Us or something, but I wouldn't necessarily join Field & Stream. That's not in my interest, right?
Katie (40:43):
Right.
Gina (40:44):
So, I just think that building community for brands is going to be absolutely key in their survival.
Katie (40:54):
I love the idea of the accidental community that you talked about too. That you just did it, you built it organically and authentically by sharing what you love, what lights you up, which is something that you feel that brands could actually do.
Gina (41:11):
It's hard for brands to be authentic when their primary goal is to sell their product. But I think that there is a way that they can do it because I've seen some brands, I've seen some brands be successful at it. And there are some brands that lend itself based on where we're at. For instance, Nike, right? When you think Nike, you think of athleticism and fitness, right?
Katie (41:38):
Yeah.
Gina (41:39):
And you think of athletes and you think of being fit and I can see how certain huge brands could build a community around the love for fitness or athleticism. Or Starbucks could build a community around coffee. There are some brands that are going to have an easier time building community. But I think brands over the next year, 2021 brands are going to be scrambling to figure out how to build community. That's my prediction.
Katie (42:10):
Hopefully, they'll connect with you, because you've built a wonderful, vibrant community. And getting The What newsletter in my inbox every week is so much fun. I look forward to reading it because you source and surface wonderful, wonderful finds. And you haven't steered me wrong yet. So, I want to make sure that our listeners know where to— how can they sign up for The What?
Gina (42:32):
All they need to do is go to thewhatlist.com. And there's a newsletter sign-up box front and center. And it's as simple as that, it's free. It comes every Wednesday unless I'm swamped or underwater, and then we'll come on Thursday.
Katie (42:48):
Nice. It's good to be your own boss.
Gina (42:51):
Yeah, exactly.
Katie (42:52):
And besides The What List is there anyone product or resource that… our job is surfacing all these wonderful finds. Is there something special this week or in the last month that you want to tell our listeners about to make sure they don't miss?
Gina (43:08):
I think I mentioned it earlier in the podcast about the book Breath. That's what we're really into right now by James Nestor. That was a book that we stumbled across about how to breathe. And I think really learning how to breathe and lower your stress level is extremely important during COVID. Lowering this stress level, but also strengthening your lungs. So, I would say our pick from this week is the book Breath.
Katie (43:33):
Thank you very much, Gina. Thanks for being here today. Really appreciate it.
Gina(43:36):
My pleasure. Thanks, Katie.
Katie (43:38):
This wraps A Certain Age, a show for women over 50, who are aging without apology. Thanks for listening. I really appreciate your time and your willingness to tune in. And I'd love your help in making the podcast grow. So, please leave a review for the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you tune in. If Instagram or Facebook is more your thing, come keep me company over at @acertainagepod. Plus, we have show notes and bonus content. I'll link to The What List and link to the Breath book. You can find it all on our website at acertainagepod.com.
Special thanks to Michael Mancini Productions who composed and produce our theme music. See you next time. And until then: age boldly, beauties.