Meet Johanna Quaas, 86 year-old YouTube phenomenon. While we're the first people to admit that she's an extreme outlier in the area of senior fitness and sport, a lot of people are fascinated by the example she sets. She simply defies the accepted wisdom about old age.
As we'll be writing in an upcoming Medium post, Ms. Quaas and people like her are culturally significant in the sense that as the Baby Boomers age, they're less inclined to view characters like this as simply inspirational/exceptional and more inclined to view them as aspirational, i.e., many Baby Boomers see people like her as a model for how they too may age.
There's a lesson for marketers in Johanna's 4,000,000+ YouTube hits: It doesn't matter whether your audience will actually be able to do an effortless back somersault in their 80s—most of them obviously won't—it's often true that if you want your message to resonate with your audience, it's better speak to the person they aspire to be, instead of the person they actually are.