EXPRESS: Biological Age and its Value to Marketing Theory and Practice

Aging has profound effects on how we consume, yet marketers often simplify aging to the mere passage of time (chronological age; ChronAge), overlooking biological and psychological aspects and meaningful variation within ChronAge segments. This paper highlights the need for multidimensional approaches to studying aging consumers and pioneers a framework integrating biological aging into consumer behavior theory. It introduces a measure of biological age (BioAge), derived from epigenetic data, to marketing. Using Health and Retirement Study data, the analyses demonstrate that BioAge captures distinct aspects of aging, not reflected in ChronAge, and improves prediction of consumer activities and spending. BioAge is most useful in domains where functional capacity, energy, cognition, and health-related constraints shape engagement, including technology use, social and physical activity, and discretionary entertainment spending, and is limited in more routinized or necessity-based domains. The analyses further show that BioAge mediates the impact of time on consumer behavior through objective physiological pathways, including chronic disease, cognitive functioning, and physical vitality, rather than subjective perceptions of health. The paper concludes with implications and best practices, including how BioAge can improve segmentation and customer lifetime value optimization, and the ethical and legal challenges of its use in research and practice.