On the Subject of Generational Nonsense (Part 3)

When my daughter Stephanie was 7, she looked up from the comics one morning at breakfast and asked me to listen to her as she read the Calvin and Hobbes strip. It seems that Calvin was complaining to his imaginary tiger friend that “they” don’t name a generation “until you get really old – like 20.” Stephanie then said with a quizzical look on her face, “Daddy, I don’t understand. Isn’t a new generation born every day?”

At age 7 she had pointed out the obvious that probably few of us in marketing ever see. Instead we clump together people born over an arbitrarily chosen number of years and give them all-too-clever names. We then make monstrously broad generalizations that have scant foundation in reality.

While conducting a workshop in 1996, the year the first boomers turned 50, I asked for two volunteers, one born in 1946 and another born in 1964, the bookends of the boomer “generation.” A balding man, a bit wide of girth, approached the podium. A trim, well-groomed 32-year-old man followed him. Before I could say anything, someone from the audience got the point and shouted, “They’re twins!

I asked each man to talk about his plans for the next five years. The 32-year-old said he wanted to get into the top echelons of his company, buy a bigger house, and start working a few less than his customary 12 to 14 hours a day. The 50-year old in effect said, “Been there, done that. I’m easin’ up now. Making my life simple. Gonna retire in a few years and I’d like to get some practice now.”

Each man was at a very different time of life, with different aspirations and goals, yet both are called boomers, supposedly having much in common because, we’re told over and over, “boomers were shaped by the same events growing up.”

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In his book, The Seasons of a Man’s Life, Yale developmental psychologist Daniel Levinson drafted a definition of generation that makes more sense much of what we hear in marketing about what defines this or that generation.

Levinson found that in terms of a person’s tight affinity with others – certainly a prerequisite of the theory of cohort effect – a generation consists of people within 6 or 7 years of one another. Thus, from a subjective perspective, the psychological span of a generation is 12 to 14 years.

Let’s apply Levinson’s thinking to the so-called boomer generation that spans 18 years. As was evident in the differences between the two boomers in my workshop, the oldest and youngest boomers fall into two separate generations.

Because cohort effects supposedly give people who feel generationally connected a certain like-mindedness, Levinson’s research challenges much of what has been said about boomers. Specifically, given his claim that generational affinity applies to people within 6 or 7 years of one’s age, it is nonsensical to talk about the boomer market as though it were one monolithic market, because they did not all grow up experiencing the same seminal events. For example, the youngest boomers were toddlers when Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were murdered.

By Levinson’s reasoning, babies born between 1946 and 1952 had one foot in the so-called Silent Generation and the other in the Boomer Generation. Babies born between 1958 and 1964 had one foot in the Boomer Generation and the other foot in the Generation X generation. Only people born between 1952 and 1958, numbering around 25 million – not 78 million had both feet in the Boomer Generation as most people define it.

So, when people talk about marketing to “the aging boomer market,” they are talking about marketing to a largely illusionary market – the same as the representation that boomers led the transformation of society in the 1960s is illusory (see an earlier post here on the mythical history of boomers) – and the same as the article that inspired this series promotes a mythical picture of “Nexter’s” uniqueness.

But I will have more to say about so-called Nexters in my next post.