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.

Comments

[sereneambition]

Great blog site. This my first comment, but one thing I do observe is that a lot of the "marketing" paradigm is focused on what people want or attempting to understand their behaviors and attributes as suggested in these 'generational' postings. I think 'boomer' is less a description of a demographic than it is a mindset. In this sense there are at least 78 million or so people who by virtue of there demographic weight have influenced and pehaps determined the cultural context. It may have less to do with the numbers than simply being as big as it needs to be to constitute a critical mass which creates the 'reality' including 'demand' for all of us. In this sense, "Boomer" is a "transgenerational" phenomenon.