Marketing Millennials
A comment by author JD Cowan demonstrates the deliberate memory holing of Generation Y in this article from 2001.
Here at the turn of the real millennium, trend forecasters and futurists are pondering new ways of cross-marketing to all of America's biggest consumer groups. First there was the generation of World War II GIs--part of Mr. Brokaw's The Greatest Generation--followed by the Silent Generation and their kids, the Baby Boomers--the group that cemented generational targeting as a discipline.
Then came Generations X and Y, and now there's the "Millennial" generation.
There you have it--generations X, Y, and the Millennials all acknowledged as separate cohorts. That was the accepted model until Madison Avenue Boomers revised history, but we're getting ahead of ourselves.
They also skipped Generation Jones, but what else is new?
In the past, generations were defined largely by the year in which one was born. Now target marketing has reached the point where generational attitudes are discerned and used as a starting point for media planning.
Like I've been saying for a while now, classifying generations by twenty-year intervals is arbitrary line drawing in an era of rapidly accelerating societal change.
In other words, it makes no sense to call someone who grew up with neither internet nor smart phones but who remembers the Cold War a part of the same generation as someone whose entire life span parallels that of The Simpsons.
"Generation Y was a [popular phrase] in 1993, a term which at that point identified correctly the last third of Gen X," Mr. Strauss said. "The notion has become familiar in popular culture and in marketing to refer to teenagers. But now Y is a little older-those marketing styles are either directed at current young twenty-somethings or they're applying the veneer of X to a short-lived effort to reach teenagers that is not going to work over time." Understanding the new generation as its own animal is key to reaching its members successfully, Mr. Strauss said.
Defining the Millennials as the generation born in or after 1982, Mr. Strauss calls them more numerous, more affluent, better educated and more ethnically diverse than generations past. Millennials also have been trained to be "doers" and "achievers."
"The GI's were the first great generation," said Mr. Strauss. "We now need a new `greatest generation'-one that's responsible and civic-minded. The shoes are there for them to fill. It's harder to become more cynical than the boomers, or more sarcastic than the Xers. The kids aren't going to go linearly from what adults are doing; historically, they never have."
Thus proving a) that Generation Y is a real cohort which differs significantly from the Millennials, b) that the former term was cynically phased out by marketers, and c) how clueless most people in marketing are.
To hear me discuss Generation Y in more detail, listen to my appearance on The Front Porch Show.
If that piques your interest, read my #1 best seller:
