But some marketers, in some countries, aren’t feeling the need to wait. In fact, on my last stop on the European tour sponsored by Bayard Publications—Madrid—I had a meeting of the minds with one of the top marketing folks from Laboratorios Indas.

If you’re not a woman in Spain with an, ahem, leakage problem, you may not have heard of Indasec, their core product. But it is Indasec that dominates the Spanish incontinence market with their adult diapers targeted to women.

What struck me about his presentation on the recent history of their marketing efforts was the evolutionary parallel to the stages of adult development that I have been sharing with marketers in the US and abroad.

In brief, there are three stages of development that adults may transit. The big news here for marketers is that until recently, it was thought that once individuals reach 45 or so, they become static: either serene but marginalized or in a slow, sad decline. Anything but dynamic and vital, going through the kind of juicy life stages that marketers love to address with helpful advice, products and services.

The woman in each stage of development is receptive to an equivalent message—and the stages, if and when they are transited, are sequential.

The evolution of Indasec provides a vivid example. A few years back, their ads featured a female pharmacist, offering emotional support to the female consumer, who was most apt to discretely purchase the product in a medical setting, as if incontinence were both a disease, and a cause for embarrassment requiring soothing assurances.

This appeal correlates to what I refer to as “The Core Boomer”, the woman who continues to live out the belief system into which she was born. Conservative and influenced by paternalistic authority, she is the boomer who would respond best to the pharmacist’s white coat, and her assurances that she will be taken care of. (To their credit, Indasec—even back then—showed a revolutionary streak putting a woman in the authoritarian role.)

And while the ads worked well enough for awhile, the marketers at Indasec soon began to believe that their customer was outpacing them in terms of her wants and needs, and how she wanted to be communicated with.

In fact, she was moving into a more advanced stage of adult development, the stage we refer to as “reactive.” The woman in stage two is no longer the dutiful consumer, looking to third party authority to help her make her decisions. In fact, she has moved into a stage in which previous beliefs have been rejected while she is seizing a sense of her own independence.

The second set of Indasec advertisements centered around Concha Velasco, a famous Spanish movie star with a powerful demeanor, who made headline news in Spain by willing to become publicly identified with not only the product, but the issue. Simultaneously, the product, itself, was going through its own evolution, making its way from medicinal packaging suitable for pharmacies, and onto supermarket shelves, complete with feminine packaging that refused to hide away in shame.

Now, the ads showed women going about active lives, as if they had no issue, at all. In both the explicit and the implied, there was the subtle signature of stage two women: a refusal to let previous beliefs and limitations define who she is. At the same time, as long as she is in reaction to her original programming—now in defiance, denial or any other kneejerk response—she is not at the ultimate stage of adult development.

For as momentous an evolution as this represented, the parallel to the stages of adult development did not reach its peak until the most recent set of ads. Again featuring Concha, this series of ads appeals to the stage three woman, the individual that we refer to as “actualized.”

The actualized woman breaks both denial and defiance, and simply goes about the tasks of living her life, with as much élan and grace as she can muster. It is in this stage that the spiritual converges with marketing, which Indasec illustrates with its current message. Paraphrasing the Spanish: “You know what you want. You are a woman who doesn’t let the losses stop you.”

In other words, this woman embraces all of life—including her incontinence. She doesn’t love it, glamorize it or deny it. She simply accepts that life is complex and disappointing: but as an actualized woman in stage three, she is up to the challenge, whatever life sends her way.

And so is Indasec. They have grown over 20 percent a year every year between 2000 and 2006. Sometimes, it doesn’t take a guru to point the way to a more actualized future. Sometimes, all it takes is a smart marketers.

Carol Orsborn