Immersion Active presents Ageless Marketing

The Mind of the Unsubscriber

Every now and then I write something that I know as the words drift down into my sentences will upset some readers and motivate a few to unsubscribe. Some of these miffed readers have been around for a while, so I must believe that they once thought my blog had value to them. But one transgression against some deep belief and they zap me out of their computer life.

And that’s OK. People are certainly entitled to express their differences with a writer by refusing to let him or her into their minds. But I wonder about the workings of those minds. Have my words come into their consciousness as an untenable threat? How much anger might I have aroused? Or contempt?
History is rich in examples of people of great learning who have refused to embrace an idea that contradicts beliefs already in place despite new evidence indicating their existing beliefs are invalid. The Church’s rejection of Galileo’s ideas about solar centricity is among the most famous.

More recently, scientists refused to believe Jane Goodall’s claims that chimpanzees made and used tools, even though she had documented the practice through photography. Geologists resisted the idea that earth had but one continent eons ago and many astrophysicists reflexively pooh-poohed black holes and the Big Bang.

Belief follows need. We all know people who believe something to be true that empirical research has shown otherwise.

Even that great man of E=MC2 fame rejected a fundamental premise of quantum mechanics – its probabilities structure of all matter and energy in contrast to Newton’s deterministic structure of the universe. Albert Einstein solemnly declared, “God doesn’t play dice with the universe.
Why do we cling to beliefs that empirical research has totally undermined?

My youngest daughter Stephanie sang a song to me yesterday that offers an answer in metaphor. The song is about an unraveling love affair in which the singer dolefully tells her errant lover. “If you want to destroy my sweater, hold this thread as I walk away.”

The Church bitterly rejected the Galilean idea that the sun owned the center of our slice of the universe. Church cognoscenti knew that idea undercut their teaching that man dwelled at the center of the Cosmos.

The Church’s hegemony over science unraveled like a sweater disappearing as a single strand is pulled away from its body. The Church’s claim to absolute power over the masses dissolved. The idea of absolute power in human affairs became an anathema. As the unraveling of papal authority continued, the erosion of autocratic authority continued into the secular realm. The doctrine of the divine right of kings evaporated, making possible the rise of modern democracy.

Those were times when almost everything people thought they knew was wrong. Right in their grandfather’s day, but wrong in their lifetimes.

We live in similar times today. As happen half a millennium ago, these times challenge us to submit almost every secular belief we have to reexamination to determine if they still hold.

Take my field, marketing. Many of the rules great marketing minds played by in the last century have become obsolete. For example, who would have imagined even a dozen years ago that consumers would displace advertising as the primary source of product information?
These are not times when we should reflexively reject ideas others present to us simply because they contradict what we already believe.

I suspect that the few readers who unsubscribed in the past 24 hours did so in response to my statement in reviewing The Starfish and the Spider, “While the book is anything but political, it contains a persuasive argument why the war on terrorism cannot be won through armed conflict, nor for that matter, the war in Iraq.”

The Starfish and the Spider discusses a new concept in organizational theory that we found was subscribed to in various measure by companies presented as exemplars of a new way to organize and operate business enterprises. Unfortunately, terrorist groups around the globe have discovered the awesome effectiveness of this new way – a way that does not depend on centralized leadership.

One of Whole Foods’ reasons for extraordinary success is the distribution of authority to an unprecedented degree in the grocery category. Each store is its own experiment, as one executive observed. Local managers are free to make many decisions they believe best for their locale.

New Jersey-based Commerce Bank operates in a similar fashion. One executive told me, “At Commerce, there’s a saying, ‘you ask for forgiveness not permission.’”

Hierarchical command-and-control management with layers of power holders is OUT. Flat, networked organizations with distributed power are IN.

But tell that to dozens of other CEOs around the country. Many can’t see their company’s operation in any other way than through the antiquated lens of hierarchically organized command-and-control management. For them, there is no other way. And by golly it’s still the right way.

Not.

It's not easy putting to new tests much of what you once held to be universal truth. But organizational survival will increasisngly depend on doing so.

In praising The Starfish and the Spider, Paul Saffo, Director of the Institute for the Future said, "The Starfish and the Spider lifts the lid on a massive revolution in the making, a revolution certain to reshape every organization on the planet from bridge clubs to global governments.

Talk about challenging long-standing beliefs, Saffo has done it in spades. Don't argue with his statement. Probe it for its possibile veracity. And if you then deem his statement true, then start reorgnaizing your life and your groups accordingly.

"The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations"

My ear was glued to the radio as NPR’s Morning Edition carried an interview with Ori Brafman, co-author of The Starfish and the Spider.

Brafman was discussing organizational approaches that we found commonplace in companies presented in Firms of Endearment as exemplars of the stakeholder relationship management (SRM) business model. As soon as the interview was over, I rushed to my computer to order a copy of The Starfish and the Spider from Amazon.

Two days later I was deep in reading one of the more engaging business books I’ve read in awhile.

While the book is anything but political, it contains a persuasive argument why the war on terrorism cannot be won through armed conflict, nor for that matter, the war in Iraq. For similar reasons why that is so, General Motors and Ford are unlikely to survive much longer in their present form.

The world is now infected with terrorist cells that do not depend on a hierarchical organization to wreak havoc virtually anywhere on the planet they choose to. Calling armed conflict against these elusive autonomous cells of destruction a “war” distorts reality. Most people think of wars as open, armed conflict between nations or states headed by clearly identifiable leaders. As a nation, we’ve always operated on the premise that if you take out the leader you end the war.

That will not happen with the terrorist activity that plagues the world today. A hierarchically organized state, such as our own, cannot move nimbly enough to be everywhere a terrorist might be with his tool kit of destruction.

The hierarchical, heavily bureaucratized organizations GM and Ford have built for themselves cause them to lumber through the world of business enterprise like octogenarians trying to coax tired legs and stiff bones to move a little bit faster.

Brafman observes that starfish are eminently capable of surviving assault. Cut off an arm and it grows a new one. Meanwhile, the severed arm grows into a new starfish. In contrast, cut off a spider’s leg or two and it begins to hobble. Cut of its head and it dies. A starfish doesn’t have a head. In fact, it doesn’t have a brain. Yet it’s ability to survive many dangers is impressively greater than that of a spider.

Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future, says that “The Starfish and the Spider lifts the lid on a massive revolution in the making, a revolution certain to reshape every organization on the planet from bridge clubs to global governments.”

That revolution is accompanying the emergence of the Age of Transcendence – the name I give the present era in Firms of Endearment, which will be available on Amazon February 9.

The Starfish and the Spider offers insights into the forces that are massively altering the very bedrock of organizational cultures the world over. To paraphrase Winston Churchill’s famous statement about architectural determinism (Man shapes his buildings; thereafter they shape him), “We shape our organizations; thereafter they shape us.”

FoE Release Date is At Hand (At Last!)

With the official release of Firms of Endearment just two weeks away, I decided to beef up the FoE blog site with a few postings this week. The first posting, FoEs Are Simple-Minded Organizations compares the way FoEs (or more formally, companies that operate around the stakeholder relationship management SRM) business model with the way the human brain works: a robust example of the classic proposition that "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts."

The next two posts, How FoEs Leverage the Second Law of Thermodynamics, shows why comparison  hierarchically organized companies, with their command and control operational approaches are obsolete: they are closed systems with little ability to renew themselves. In contrast, FoEs are open systems with extraordinary plasticity that gives them the ability to rapidly respond to situational changes.

Thanks to all of you who have preordered Firms of Endearment from Amazon over the past several months. The wait is almost over. The big date is February 9.

My co-author, Raj Sisodia spent the recent holidays in his native India and while there gave three speeches on Firms of Endearment. He said that in his entire professional life he has never had such a stron, positive response to a speech. He received standing ovations and plaudits for the inspirational, even spiritual character of the book. He said that people were particularly intrigued by the Prologue and early chapters that I had written, jokingly telling me that I was going to be elevated to guru status in India, so I better get used to wearing saffron robes.

I would like to go on record here as saying that working with Raj Sisodia in writing Firms of Endearment has been one of the supreme joys of my long professional life. He is gracious to a fault and has never used his first name placement (which he abundantly deserves) on the cover of the book as a position from which he speaks his mind. We have been truly an egoless partnership in producing a book about which the following luminaries have said:

"Firms of Endearment is one of the most important business books in years, if not decades. Its introduction of the concept of ironic management alone marks it as a breakthrough book for business in the 21st century. Chock full of new thinking, Firms of Endearment seems destined to influence business management theory as no book has in a long, long time."

Peter Derby, former Managing Executive for Operations and Management, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Former Chairman & CEO, DialogBank and Troika Dialog Investment Banking Group

"This book not only challenges capitalism's traditional marketing paradigm but the very "genes" of capitalism.  If any book is going to launch a New Capitalism of Caring, it is this book that redefines great companies as stakeholder value builders, not just shareholder agents."

Philip Kotler, C. Johnson & Son Distinguished Professor of International Marketing at Northwestern University (named by the Financial Times as the #4 management guru of all time behind Jack Welch, Bill Gates, and Peter Drucker)

"Aligning the interests of multiple stakeholders is becoming a “table stakes” issue. Although achieving such alignment requires extra work, this book shows why it’s well worth the effort. More loyal customers, more engaged employees, more trust between labor and management, more community support and ultimately more value produced for shareholders. If you don’t feel inspired to adopt a stakeholder relationship operating model after reading this book, you never will."

Andrew C. Kerin, President Domestic Food, Hospitality and Facilities
Aramark Corporation

"Most people think of convergence in terms of technologies coming together, but Firms of Endearment proves that there's another form of convergence going on. Companies
no longer can defend putting profits ahead of winning share of heart because customers and investors increasingly believe one doesn't come without the other. As this books points out
so well, companyies succeed in building value when they focus on being socially responsible on behalf of all their constituents."

Ivan Seidenberg, CEO Verizon

"A powerful blow to selfishly greedy market fundamentalism of the Darwinistic sort, Firms of Endearment is also a thoroughly documented invitation to responsible capitalism."

Prabhu Guptara, Executive Director, Organization Development, subsidiary of UBS AG.

The Astonishing Mysteries of the Human Mind/Brain Complex

Be sure not to miss getting into this week’s Time (Jan 29). It is focused on new discoveries about the human mind/brain complex.

Some people will have a hard time getting through the articles – not because they are scholarly, but because much in the content challenges the way we've been thinking about our selves and our behavior from time immemorial.

Take, for example, the issue of objectivity – that is, the removal of one's self from what one holds hold to be true. Objectivity is inherently not possible. All reality is subjective. That which we classify as objective is usually no more than an expression of consensus about what is deemed true or not true. In other words, objective reality is an illusion.

Of course Hindu gurus have maintained that for millennia. In the remarkable book Phantoms in the Brain, neurologist V.S. Ramachandran’s offers a rich body of proof that supports those ancients’ view of reality. Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of Southern California, San Diego, tells of one patient who has normal cognitive powers except that he cannot recognize his parents as his parents. By most people’s reckoning, his parents objectively exist. But to him those posing as his parents are imposters.

Ramachandran tells of other patients who have suffered strokes at a particular site in the right parietal lobe that has left the left side of their body paralyzed. These patients do not recognize that their paralysis. Ask a patient to raise her left arm and she will say she is doing it though it remains frozen in her lap. One patient explained that her mother left the immobile arm in her lap in the hospital years ago. Another charged hospital medical students with playing a ghoulish joke by putting severed limbs in his bed.

Keep in mind that these are not crazies. They have normal cognitive functions in all other ways. Strangely, however, squirt a few drops of ice-cold water in a patient’s left ear canal and then ask them to raise their left hand. “I can’t,” they will typically answer. Why? “Because I had a stroke that paralyzed the left side of my body.” After the effect of the ice-cold water wears off in from two minutes to about a half an hour, they will have no memory of realizing that their left side is paralyzed.

The point of this post is to once again encourage readers in the marketing game to read all they can on the brain because what we are learning is about to turn the science and art of human marketplace communications upside down. You need to know about these findings for the sake of your own career. Besides, the intrepid souls who are not afraid to face the reality that almost everything they thought they knew about their minds and brains is wrong will experience new and wondrous delights about themselves as they begin to integrate what brain researchers are learning about the human mind/brain complex.

This has been my experience – so much so that I’ve become a real brain book junkie with a rather large library of books about the mind/brain complex reaching back 30 years.

On the Subject of Generational Nonsense (Part 4)

Over the past three posts, I have unhesitatingly criticized the marketing community’s obsession with clumping people together under generational names and then holding forth about the supposed differences from other generations. This tends to cause marketers to overlook critically important commonalities between people across generational divides.

Ever since RCA research director Wendell Smith wrote an article about segmenting consumers for The Journal of Marketing in 1956, the marketing community has moved away from thinking about consumers in terms of “human universals”.

Smith argued that marketers should give up the shotgun approach that targeted everyone indiscriminately and replace it with a rifle shot approach that targeted defined groups of consumers. His logic had instant credibility. It triggered one of the greatest paradigm shifts in the history of marketing. The problem is, it led marketers to focus almost exclusively on consumers’ differences.

The late Bill Bernbach, one of advertising’s greatest minds ever, would understand why that was a flawed approach to marketing. In a posting I made September 15, 2005, I recalled a strategically significant thought of Bernbach’s:

“Human nature hasn’t changed for a million years. It won’t even change in the next million years. Only the superficial things have changed. It is fashionable to talk about the changing man. A communicator must be concerned with the unchanging man – what compulsions drive him, what instincts dominate his every action, even though his language too often camouflages what really motivates him.”

You can see the rest of that post together with comments it generated by clicking here.

Needs drive our behavior. Our need to be physically and mentally comfortable, whole, safe and secure does not change from one generation to the next. In Maslow’s hierarchy, that bundle of needs is the most basic of all needs. Then, our need for love and to be loved never changes from one generation to the next. The same holds true of our need for self-esteem and the esteem of others.

What does change from generation to generation are the ways in which we strive to meet our needs. Yet, even then we don’t operate without the influence of those who came before us. In fact, what to many is one of the most surprising facets of young people’s behavior today is that they are reflecting much stronger influence by older people than anyone can remember.

Adult development psychologists talk about how in the natural course of aging, in the second half of life people tend to become more others-centered, concerned about the meaning of their lives and generally inclined toward more spiritual behaviors (not necessarily rooted in an organized religion). Further, the older person tends to become more subjective in processing information from the external world and more comfortable with “going with the gut.”

Today, younger people are reflecting in varying degrees behavioral attributes long associated with the second half of life. And why should we be surprised at that. People 40 and older are now the adult majority by a huge number – 136 million to 86 million. So, why shouldn’t the sheer weight of the number of older people in our society be changing the zeitgeist?

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.”

______________________

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.

On the Subject of Generational Nonsense (Part 2)

The custom of naming generations began in the post–World War II era. It was not spearheaded by social scientists. Marketers began the practice sans scientific foundation.

Inspiration often comes from outside marketing. For instance, marketers borrowed boomer from Landon Jones’ 1981 book, Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom. Interestingly, the oldest boomers were by then 35. They became the first age cohort in history to be given a name used ubiquitously.

Charles Hamblett and Jane Deverson's 1964 novel Generation X gave marketers for the next so-called generation. Douglas Copeland's 1991 book - Generation X: tales for an accelerated culture – brought the term into widespread usage.

At the end of the day (to use a hackneyed phrase), the value of giving calendrically defined cohorts names has less value than the ubiquitous usage would indicate. A Wikopedia chart http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_generation on generations supports this view. The chart clearly depicts the arbitrary manner in which generations are named. There is an absence of uniformity concerning how many years frame a cohort’s existence, and lack of uniformity as to the calendrical bookends of a cohort.

Some say the boomer cohort began in 1946 and ended in 1957. Others say its birth years run from 1946 through 1964. There is less consistency in marking the beginning and ending birth years of both Generation X and Generation Y.

William Strauss and Neil Howe took the idea of a generationally defined view of history to its highest levels in their book Generations. However, their reckoning lacks the statistical consistency upon which accuracy of comparative analysis of generations depends in crucial contexts. For instance, the cohort they call The Transcendental Generation spans 29 years: 1792 – 1819 while their Progressive Generation spans just 16 years: 1843 – 1859. Assigning defining attributes to a 29-year age cohort seems problematic to me for reasons I will give in my next post.

The shortest generation in the Wikopedia chart is Generation Jones, so named by Jonathan Pontell.

Pontell unabashedly goes against the grain and reduces the boomer cohort to seven birth years (1946 – 1953). He then calls Generation Jones the largest adult cohort. But what does Pontell consider a cohort? He defines the birth years of Generation Jones’ as 1954 –1962. That indeed is the largest 8-year adult cohort. However, few would agree that an age cohort spanning just eight years is worthy of being named as a generation.

A danger in naming cohorts in the manner popular among marketers is gross distortion of reality. For instance, boomers were first defined synonymously as the Me Generation. That was accurate at the time because boomers were in their self-centered youthhood. However the attribute stuck. As boomers grew older, it was commonly believed that boomers would remain egocentric in their worldview and lifestyles as they went into old age.

But that prediction has proven wrong, as evidenced by the biggest boom in philanthropy in history that is being led by boomers.

This was a predictable event. I wrote about it in the late 1980s under a section heading in Serving the Ageless Market, “The Coming if the Age of Aquarius II.” I said boomers would generally age in much the same manner as their parents had: concerned about the meaning o their lives and whether they would have made a difference by the time they drew their final breath. I wrote this:

Fifteen to twenty years ago [remember, this was written in 1988], the oldest of the Boomer cohort trimmed their hair, shaved their beards, removed their funny jewelry, and put their bras back on and joined the establishment to fulfill the urges of the first experiential lifestyle stage of adulthood – the Possession Experience years. Many, succeeded beyond their expectations despite their earlier negative views of materialism.

Now, two decades or so after redefining social decorum with the caricatured behavior of youthful excess while espousing noble ideals, many Boomers are revisiting those ideals. They are asking themselves the perennial midlife question, "Is this all there is?" Many are saying, "The values of that matter most are still those we marched for in our youth." They see glimmers of great new possibilities in a new life, a new society, based upon their "old values."

Boomers are taking us back to "basics" after they led society away from them in the Age of Aquarius. We may now be in the beginning stages of its sequel, the Age of Aquarius II.

________________

Granted that not all people become philanthropic-minded in the second half of life, it is a well-known tenet in adult development psychology that shifting from self-centeredness to others-centeredness is a milestone that signals a person’s advancement into higher levels of human beingness. Those who don’t experience this in the Fall and Winter seasons of their lives are – well, developmentally retarded, shall we say.

I’ll continue this examination of the practice of naming generations in my next post.

On the Subject of Generational Nonsense

The play is always the same. Only the actors change.

More than we seem willing to admit, the people of one generation live out their lives in much the same pattern as people of any other generation. Of course, each of us feels our generation is different. And marketers have a bent towards isolating the consumer population by sticking us in some all-too cleverly named category.

Last week, PBS’s Judy Woodruff hosted a special on “Generation Next” – the next named generation after Generation Y. Supposedly, Nexters are greatly different from Y’ers, X’ers and boomers.

However, Generation Next, sometimes called “the Millenials”, differs mainly from Y’ers, X’ers, boomers and my generation, the Silents, at a comparable age in but two regards:

• They have a wider range of options to draw from to fulfill their needs
• Their worldviews and behavior are more substantially influenced by people in the second half of life than true of earlier generations.

Despite those differences, however, so-called Nexters are striving to fulfill the same needs as their X’er parents and boomer grandparents at comparable ages.

Woodruff’s impeccable journalistic skills revealed the soul of the Nexters as a group, but in so doing she unintentionally validated the idea that needs – which define the foundations of all our behavior– never change. Only the ways in which we try to satisfy our needs change.

A marketer has as vital an interest in knowing what’s behind acts of behavior as well as in the acts of behavior themselves. Yet, too many marketers focus overwhelmingly on acts of behavior. To the extent they take an interest in the foundations of consumers’ behavior, they do so under the illusion that consumers can tell them why they do what they do. However, the biggest open secret in consumer research is that people are generally not very knowledgeable about the foundations of their behavior.

Neurologist Bernard J. Baars wrote in his book, In the Theater of Consciousness, “Our inability to accurately report intentions and expectations may simply reflect the fact that they are qualitatively not conscious.”

Famed neurologist Richard Restak agrees: “We have reason to doubt that full awareness of our motives and other mental activities may be possible,” he wrote in The Modular Brain.

Having raised three boomers, two Gen X’ers and one Gen Y’er, I can testify to the fact that each of my six children went through the same stages of development. While their behavioral styles differed, the drivers of their behavior did not.

From the Judy Woodruff’s Generation Next transcript:

Harvard student, Nigerian-born Adora Mora: I feel like our generation kind of has ADD in terms of you can't just sit down and, you know, let's relax. Okay? (laughter). I'd say quick, fast, in a hurry is pretty much our motto. We want it. We want it now.

That’s news? I don’t think so. Mora pretty much describes my children during their adolescent and young adult years. And she was born and raised on another continent.

One interviewee said, “"I think that the history that's going to be written about my generation is going to talk about how we've responded to unbelievable challenges like no other generation for at least this century..."

That sounds little different from what my boomer kids thought about themselves – or my X’er kids, or my Y’er kid. Remember boomers in the 60’s and 70’s boisterously trying to change the world? Stuffing flowers down the muzzle of National Guard rifles while chanting, “Make love, not war!” In my estimation, the same forces drive Nexters in their Spring of life as true with boomers in the same season.

The practice of referring to people born between the calendrical bookends of some period is mostly the doing of marketers. However, no empirical foundation exists for the way marketers divide up the population into named generations. Sadly, in so doing, much of what marketers should know about people’s root motivations and behavioral responses is obscured by that practice.

I’ll say more about that and other things about generations in my next post.