By Dr. Leahcim Semaj
Psychologist | Author | Social Philosopher
The Semaj MindSpa — Where Mind, Spirit, and Science Meet
From Content to Community – From Community to Commerce.
Something interesting has been happening with The Semaj MindSpa. It was not originally designed as some grand commercial enterprise. I was doing what I have done for most of my professional life: observing people, asking questions, applying psychology to everyday problems and trying to make complicated ideas useful.
Then people started showing up. And they kept showing up. They read the articles. Watched the Reels. Shared the quote cards. Downloaded the longer pieces. Listened to the radio programmes. Sent the MindSpa Minutes to friends. Gradually, what began as a psychological content platform started looking like something else. A community. And perhaps, if we are thoughtful about it, a business.
I have spent more than four decades working with organisations, leaders, consumers and brands. One lesson I learned fairly early is that having a good idea and having a viable business are two quite different things. So I have been asking myself a different question lately:
What is the commercial architecture of The Semaj MindSpa? I think I can now see it. Four connected businesses: Media. Community. Experiences. Intelligence.
Not four separate ventures competing for attention. Each should feed the next. And we have already built more of it than I initially realised.
Phase One: Media – We Have Done This
The first task was to get people’s attention. That sounds easy until you remember that everybody is competing for everybody else’s attention. We are competing with TikTok dances, political scandals, football, WhatsApp, Netflix, breaking news, grandchildren, work, traffic and whatever outrage social media has decided we must become angry about today. Yet people have made room for The Semaj MindSpa. Recent numbers tell part of the story.
In one 28-day period, our content generated more than 800,000 views, over 30,000 engagements and an audience of 21,000+ followers.
Those are good numbers. But one number surprised me more than the others. Approximately 3,200 long-form articles were downloaded in 30 days. Remember, we are constantly being told that people don’t read anymore. I don’t quite believe that. People may not read things that bore them. That is different. Give somebody an article about why good people are ending up alone, relationships after 60, men quietly giving up, sex after 70, what happens when nobody needs you anymore, or how to design the Anchor Leg of Life – and apparently some people will find the time.
The Media pillar, then, is established. Articles. Reels. MindSpa Minutes. Radio. YouTube. Substack. Social media. We know how to create content. We know there is an audience for it. But 800,000 views do not necessarily constitute a business. That realization changes the question. What happens to all those people after they watch?
Community: Followers Are Not Enough
I have become increasingly suspicious of the word followers. Twenty-one thousand followers sounds impressive. But what exactly is a follower? Somebody may watch a Reel while waiting at a traffic light, laugh, agree, send it to a friend and never think about Semaj MindSpa again. That’s reach. Community is something different. Community means relationship. So this part of the architecture is still under construction. The pathway I see is fairly straightforward:
Followers become subscribers. Subscribers become members. Members become participants. Participants eventually become a live community.
Email and SMS become important here because I don’t particularly like the idea of building a community that exists entirely on somebody else’s platform. Facebook can change an algorithm tomorrow morning. Instagram can decide that what worked last month no longer works. TikTok can change the rules. An audience that I cannot communicate with directly is, in some ways, an audience I am borrowing. You are ‘playing in someones backyard’. The objective now is to deepen the relationship. And the demographics suggest that there is something particularly interesting to build.
Approximately 80% of the Semaj MindSpa audience is 34–65+. About 40% is in Kingston. Now that caught my attention.
Phase Two: Experiences – Let’s Put Some People in a Room
For some time, I have been talking about what I call the Anchor Leg of Life. I prefer that language to many of the descriptions we traditionally attach to ageing. Retirement. Senior citizen. Elderly. Nothing necessarily wrong with those words, but they often come carrying psychological baggage. The Anchor Leg suggests something different. If you have ever watched a relay, you know that the anchor runner is not there to limp across the finish line. The anchor leg matters. It may determine the race. That is how I increasingly think about life after 50 or 60.
You have accumulated experience. Perhaps some resources. Your children may be grown. You have made mistakes and, hopefully, learned something from a few of them. You also begin to understand that time is no longer theoretical. So what are you going to do with it? This creates the opportunity for the next Semaj MindSpa business: Experiences. Live experiences specifically designed around this stage of life. Not “old people’s functions.” Please. I am talking about interesting, stimulating, sometimes provocative experiences around Living, Loving and Flourishing.
How do I design the next 20 or 30 years? What does intimacy look like after 60? Do I still want to be married? Should I travel more? Where should I live? How much money is enough? Who are my friends now? What happens when the career that defined me is over?
And, perhaps most importantly: What would make the rest of my life feel worth living? Those are not retirement questions. They are life questions. With 40% of our audience already in Kingston, Kingston seems the obvious place to test the first Semaj MindSpa Live experiences. (The next significant city is New York, with 20%). Our plan is to start small, learn, listen, adjust, then see where it goes. But this raises another question – one that I think Corporate Jamaica should be asking too.
When Will Marketers Wake Up to the 50+ Consumer?
Marketing has had a long love affair with youth. I understand some of the logic. Catch consumers early and perhaps you can keep them for decades. But I wonder whether that assumption has become so embedded in marketing culture that we are failing to notice another consumer standing right in front of us. The 50+ consumer. They buy cars. They travel. They renovate houses. They eat out. They entertain. They pay for healthcare. They buy insurance. They use banking and investment products. They purchase phones, tablets and internet services. They help children. They spoil grandchildren.
Some are divorced and dating again. Some are starting businesses. Some are retiring. Some have absolutely no intention of retiring. And many have something their 25-year-old selves did not have: money.
Not everybody, obviously. The economic differences within the 50+ population are substantial, and pretending otherwise would be foolish. A struggling 68-year-old pensioner and a 68-year-old business owner with several properties may share a birth year and almost nothing else economically. That is precisely why the market needs to be understood rather than stereotyped. Still, I keep wondering:
When will the companies controlling the major marketing dollars wake up to this market? Call us the 50+ Market. Call it the Silver Economy. I call this period the Anchor Leg. Call it whatever you like. Just don’t ignore it. Because I suspect there is money being left on the table.
Phase Three: Intelligence – Now We Get Serious
This is where the commercial architecture becomes particularly interesting to me. The third phase is Intelligence. And unlike some of the other parts of The Semaj MindSpa, this is not new territory for me. I have been here before. Long before social media, Reels and MindSpa Minutes, a substantial part of my professional work involved Consumer Psychology. My interest has never been merely in what people buy. The interesting question is: Why?
Why this beer and not that one? Why this chicken? Why this telecommunications company? Why does one advertisement connect while another disappears? Why does a consumer say one thing in a focus group and do something completely different when standing in front of the supermarket shelf? That space between what people say and what people actually do has fascinated me for decades. Over the years, I have done ground-breaking consumer psychology, research and positioning work involving brands such as Red Stripe, KFC, Digicel, Flow, Supreme Ventures, Bols Liquor, Malta, Big Bamboo Irish Moss, TVJ and CVM, along with many other brands that may be less well known today.
Different products. Different markets. Different periods. But the psychological task was remarkably similar. Understand the consumer. Not the consumer you imagine exists in the boardroom. The real one.
What Does the 50+ Consumer Actually Want?
This is where I believe The Semaj MindSpa has the potential to become something rather unusual. We are not simply accumulating followers. We are developing access to a community. And communities generate knowledge.
What does the Jamaican 55-year-old woman want from a hotel?
What would make a 62-year-old man change banks?
What does a financially comfortable couple in their 60s want from a weekend experience?
What frustrates people over 50 about technology?
What would make them switch telecommunications providers?
Where do they want to travel?
What are they prepared to spend money on now that their children are grown?
What do they want from restaurants, entertainment, housing, insurance, healthcare and financial services?
I don’t want to guess. Let’s ask them. That is where consumer surveys, focus groups, sponsored research, market segmentation, brand positioning and consulting enter the Semaj MindSpa architecture. The audience itself becomes a source of intelligence. And that intelligence may have considerable commercial value.
A Word to Corporate Jamaica
So let me make this part uncomplicated. If your company has decided – or is beginning to suspect – that the 50+, Anchor Leg, Silver Economy deserves serious attention, I am available. You may call the market whatever you wish. I am more interested in whether you understand it. If you want to know what these consumers are buying, let’s find out. If they are not buying your product, perhaps we should ask why. If you are developing something specifically for them, let’s test it before spending millions launching it. If your advertising agency thinks marketing to older consumers means finding an attractive grey-haired couple, putting them in white linen and photographing them walking along a beach holding hands, we definitely need to talk. There is far more psychological complexity in this market than that.
A 52-year-old executive, a 61-year-old entrepreneur, a recently divorced 67-year-old woman and an active 78-year-old grandfather are not one consumer because somebody placed them all in the box marked “50+.” Age is only the beginning of the analysis. We need to understand lifestyle, income, health, aspirations, relationships, fears, values, spending priorities and – perhaps most interestingly – what people now believe they deserve from the years they have left. That is where Consumer Psychology becomes useful.
I Have the Track Record
I am not approaching this market simply because I recently turned 75. Although, I admit, being inside the demographic provides a rather useful research perspective. I have spent more than four decades studying people, organisations, leadership, behaviour and consumers. I have worked with major Jamaican and Caribbean brands. I have watched markets change. I have seen products succeed. I have also watched companies spend substantial sums of money telling consumers things that consumers had very little interest in hearing. The Semaj MindSpa now adds something new to that history. An audience. A large one. More importantly, an engaged one.
So there may be an interesting convergence taking place: My background in psychology. My experience in consumer research and brand positioning. The Semaj MindSpa media platform. An emerging 50+ community. Live experiences. And a demographic that I believe Jamaican business has not yet fully understood. Put those pieces together and you begin to see the commercial architecture.
Media → Community → Experiences → Intelligence
That is the model. Media attracts attention. Community converts attention into relationship. Experiences take that relationship into the real world. Intelligence helps companies understand what that community thinks, wants, needs and will pay for. Then something interesting happens.
The Intelligence creates new questions. Those questions create new Media. The Media attracts more people. The Community becomes larger. The Experiences become richer. And we learn more. It becomes a circle. A commercial ecosystem built around psychology, knowledge and human behaviour.
And Yes, We Intend to Make Money
Sometimes people become uncomfortable when mission and money appear in the same sentence. I don’t. The Semaj MindSpa has a mission: Clarity. Growth. Wellbeing. But sustainability matters. If something creates genuine value, there is nothing inherently wrong with creating economic value as well. Businesses need customers. Consumers need businesses that understand them.
The Semaj MindSpa may be able to stand between those two groups and help them understand each other a little better. That is useful. And useful things can become profitable things. So my invitation to Corporate Jamaica is quite simple. If you are ready to take the 50+ consumer seriously, let’s talk. I have the track record. We are building the community. We have access to the audience. And I am available to help.
You want to make money. I want to make money. And the 50+ consumer has money they are prepared to spend when somebody finally understands what they want. There may be a good business in helping all three things happen.
Four Pillars. One Mission – MEDIA. COMMUNITY. EXPERIENCES. INTELLIGENCE.
Connecting Knowledge, Community and Experience to Create Meaningful Change.
Dr. Leahcim Semaj
Transformational Psychologist
The Semaj MindSpa