Immersion Active presents Ageless Marketing

A Millennial's Guide to Millennial Guides

 

Regular readers will immediately notice the new look of this blog’s banner. The  Ageless Marketing Blog is now sponsored by Immersion Active of Frederick, Maryland, the only marketing agency in the U.S. specializing exclusively in online marketing to 40+ markets. Immersion Active’s founders, David Weigelt and Jonathan Boehman, have recently authored Dot Boom, a book that builds on the principles of ageless marketing that I have articulated. They expand the concept of ageless marketing, adapting it to the challenges the Internet poses to marketers. Their chapter, “A Model for Meaningful Online Engagement” alone is worth the price of the book and then some by a goodly margin.

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Fast Company ran an article last week entitled A Millennial's Guide to Millennial Guides.  It was written by Dan Macsai, a Millennial who reflects on various claims made by sundry authors about Millennial attitudes and behavior. Millennials are generally regarded as those born between 1982 and 2001.

Macsai regards a number of claims made about the attitudes and behavior of Millennials as “half-truths.” Interestingly, however, many of the same claims were made about boomers decades ago. Remember for example when boomers were being called the most selfish generation in history? Macsai talks about Jean M. Twenge’s claim in her book Generation Me that Millennials are absurdly self-involved. “GenMe takes for granted that the self comes first," she says. Forty years or so earlier boomers were first described as the “Me Generation.” The claim was made with the clear implication that boomers were the first generation of youth in history to be consummately self-absorbed.

Macsai sarcastically cites a litany of claims that various authors say distinguish his and his fellow Millennials’ behavior in the marketplace, workplace and play place. But substitute "boomer" for "Millennial" and you come up with how marketers saw boomers decades ago.

For sure there are stylistic differences between boomers in their earlier years and today's Millennials. However; to a remarkable degree the substantive elements of Millennials’ attitudes and behavior mirror the attitudes and behavior of boomers in their youthful years.

I modestly regard myself as something of a “homegrown” expert on generational behavior. I have a 24-year-old daughter named Stephanie who is a Millennial. My oldest is 50-year-old Sabrina who is a boomer. The next two kids, Laura and Karen are boomers, too. Then came my two Gen X-ers, Brian and Michelle. In short, I have sired children in each of marketer's current three favorite generations.

While each of my children have distinct markers of their individuality, like babies crawling across the floor together, all six kids have developed in a more or less predictable fashion. Their development has been consistent with the observations of Carl Jung, Abraham Maslow, Erik Erikson, and other luminaries in the field of human development. Even into their middle age years they continue developing in somewhat predictable fashion, all without sacrificing their distinctive individualities.

A focus on consumers in the context of generational positions began in the early 1960s with a landmark agreement between the television ratings organization Nielson and the ABC television network. ABC was running third in the three-network television industry when it came up with an idea for more effectively competing against NBC and CBS.

ABC's audience was somewhat younger than NBC and CBS audiences. ABC sold Nielson on adding to their reports on household viewership reports on viewers by age. This was the foundation of generational marketing. This change in viewership reporting made it possible for ABC to sell advertisers on the idea of getting young people into their brands before they made lifetime decisions. Though research has shown that few consumers make lifetime brand commitments in their youth, claiming such in the early 1960s proved to be a winning marketing ploy for ABC in its quest for increasing the inflow of advertising dollars.

In eschewing sweeping generalizations made about the attitudes and behavior of Millennials in his Fast Company  article Dan Macsai has put marketers on notice that they invite disappointing results in their campaigns if they take much of what self-styled experts say on Millennials at face value.

 

Season's Greetings from the World’s Largest Plant

(This is a reprint of an essay I have run before, usually at this time of year. As we leave the Winter Holiday Season and head off into a new year, I think this essay has special significance for what we face in 2009. The year is beginning amid the most unsettled conditions in generations. Many are predicting further decline in equity markets and consumer confidence is at its lowest recorded level. Despite those and other dark clouds on the horizon, signs are beginning to appear indicating that the worst of the 2008 Crash is behind us.  But turning things around will take a lot of effort at all levels of government and business, as well as in our every day lives. All are connected. No sector of society stands apart from any other sector. This essay presents a metaphorical look at why we really have no other rational choice than to pull together regardless of our place in society or our political label if we are to quickly recover from the ravages of 2008.)

Several years ago a great discovery was announced. The largest known plant in the world had been found in Michigan. It was a single mushroom plant covering more than 100 acres.

Looking over its vast surface in full flower, one sees thousands upon thousands of mushroom caps looking like a multitudinous crowd of individual tiny people huddled together under little white umbrellas. But below ground every stem is connected to every other stem. This amazing plant seems a marvelous metaphor for us human beings – individuals on the surface, but one organism deep down.

Developmental psychologist Dan McAdams writes in Stories We Live By about two “fundamental modalities” that organize human needs, desires and goals: agency and communion. He describes agency as “the individual’s striving to separate from others, to master the environment, to assert, protect and expand the self. The aim is to become a powerful and autonomous ‘agent.’” He describes communion as “the individual’s striving to lose his or her self by merging with others, participating in something larger than self, and relating to others in warm, close and loving ways.”

Thinking about that giant mushroom, if each cap had a mind of its own, how much mental energy might each cap devote to asserting its self while losing sight of its connection to the whole? But on further thought I realize that in spite of each cap’s illusion of distinctiveness and autonomy, the will of the whole 100-acre plant works ceaselessly below the surface to help organize the needs, desires and goals of each individual cap.

Readers may recall my previous discussions of the “psychological center of gravity” hypothesis. People within five years of the adult median age make up the PCG and have a disproportionate influence on cultural themes and trends. With an adult median age of 45, today’s PCG is bracketed by the ages of 40 and 50, making it the oldest PCG in U.S. history.

Several years ago the Wall Street Journal carried an article that reflected today’s middle age PCG’s influence on teens. It told of an unprecedented flocking of teenagers to churches and synagogues in search of meaning in life – a quest traditionally more typical of people in midlife.

In many instances, teens are following a course that runs counter to parental atheism. The WSJ article viewed this as a form of rebellion, observing, “It doesn’t hurt, of course, that spiritualism and ritual permeate today’s popular culture.” The article noted Madonna’s study of Jewish mysticism, Alanis Morrisette and Puff Daddy’s references to spirituality in their music, teen clothing lines devoted to the dark, mystical-looking “Goth” fashion, and Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul’s long-running position on bestseller lists.

But is the unprecedented number of teenagers pouring into houses of worship merely an act of mass rebellion? Is growing teen attraction to ancient rites of mysticism simply another fad that will soon pass? The ROI of untold product promotional dollars rides on the answer.

If the PCG hypothesis is valid, increased adolescent interest in spirituality will not be short-lived. It will remain in force over the next decade as the PCG ages more. The subterranean workings of the collective whole, influenced by the PCG, will continue to help organize the values, needs and goals of teens.

Ironically for a nation that has long exalted the values of the young, marketers to teens can gain keen insights into the values and behavior of today’ teens by learning more about the values and behavior of the middle-aged consumers who make up the PCG.

None of this is to say that teens are developmentally entering midlife decades ahead of Nature’s schedule. They simply are tapping into midlife themes, although they experience those themes in the context of their untested adolescent worldviews.

Today’s middle-aged PCG presents marketers with an extraordinary challenge: weaving the themes of midlife values into messages for the young in ways that feel comfortable and cool to them.

The PCG’s influence on teens supports the idea that below the surface we are one, just like myriad white buttons that belong to the world’s largest plant. Much of who we are as well as what we need and desire flows from that oneness regardless of our age.

In these days of overly expressed agency, it seems to me that giving more attention to the communion that binds us together as one would help extend the feelings of togetherness that we feel so strongly at this time of year throughout the rest of the year.

May 2009 unfold for you one an all as a truly great year!

(This is a reprint of an essay I have run before, usually at this time of year. As we leave the Winter Holiday Season and head off into a new year, I think this essay has special significance for what we face in 2009. The year is beginning amid the most unsettled conditions in generations. Many are predicting further decline in equity markets and consumer confidence is at its lowest recorded level. Despite those and other dark clouds on the horizon, signs are beginning to appear indicating that the worst of the 2008 Crash is behind us.  But turning things around will take a lot of effort at all levels of government and business, as well as in our every day lives. All are connected. No sector of society stands apart from any other sector. This essay presents a metaphorical look at why we really have no other rational choice than to pull together regardless of our place in society or our political label if we are to quickly recover from the ravages of 2008.)

Several years ago a great discovery was announced. The largest known plant in the world had been found in Michigan. It was a single mushroom plant covering more than 100 acres.

Looking over its vast surface in full flower, one sees thousands upon thousands of mushroom caps looking like a multitudinous crowd of individual tiny people huddled together under little white umbrellas. But below ground every stem is connected to every other stem. This amazing plant seems a marvelous metaphor for us human beings – individuals on the surface, but one organism deep down.

Developmental psychologist Dan McAdams writes in Stories We Live By about two “fundamental modalities” that organize human needs, desires and goals: agency and communion. He describes agency as “the individual’s striving to separate from others, to master the environment, to assert, protect and expand the self. The aim is to become a powerful and autonomous ‘agent.’” He describes communion as “the individual’s striving to lose his or her self by merging with others, participating in something larger than self, and relating to others in warm, close and loving ways.”

Thinking about that giant mushroom, if each cap had a mind of its own, how much mental energy might each cap devote to asserting its self while losing sight of its connection to the whole? But on further thought I realize that in spite of each cap’s illusion of distinctiveness and autonomy, the will of the whole 100-acre plant works ceaselessly below the surface to help organize the needs, desires and goals of each individual cap.

Readers may recall my previous discussions of the “psychological center of gravity” hypothesis. People within five years of the adult median age make up the PCG and have a disproportionate influence on cultural themes and trends. With an adult median age of 45, today’s PCG is bracketed by the ages of 40 and 50, making it the oldest PCG in U.S. history.

Several years ago the Wall Street Journal carried an article that reflected today’s middle age PCG’s influence on teens. It told of an unprecedented flocking of teenagers to churches and synagogues in search of meaning in life – a quest traditionally more typical of people in midlife.

In many instances, teens are following a course that runs counter to parental atheism. The WSJ article viewed this as a form of rebellion, observing, “It doesn’t hurt, of course, that spiritualism and ritual permeate today’s popular culture.” The article noted Madonna’s study of Jewish mysticism, Alanis Morrisette and Puff Daddy’s references to spirituality in their music, teen clothing lines devoted to the dark, mystical-looking “Goth” fashion, and Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul’s long-running position on bestseller lists.

But is the unprecedented number of teenagers pouring into houses of worship merely an act of mass rebellion? Is growing teen attraction to ancient rites of mysticism simply another fad that will soon pass? The ROI of untold product promotional dollars rides on the answer.

If the PCG hypothesis is valid, increased adolescent interest in spirituality will not be short-lived. It will remain in force over the next decade as the PCG ages more. The subterranean workings of the collective whole, influenced by the PCG, will continue to help organize the values, needs and goals of teens.

Ironically for a nation that has long exalted the values of the young, marketers to teens can gain keen insights into the values and behavior of today’ teens by learning more about the values and behavior of the middle-aged consumers who make up the PCG.

None of this is to say that teens are developmentally entering midlife decades ahead of Nature’s schedule. They simply are tapping into midlife themes, although they experience those themes in the context of their untested adolescent worldviews.

Today’s middle-aged PCG presents marketers with an extraordinary challenge: weaving the themes of midlife values into messages for the young in ways that feel comfortable and cool to them.

The PCG’s influence on teens supports the idea that below the surface we are one, just like myriad white buttons that belong to the world’s largest plant. Much of who we are as well as what we need and desire flows from that oneness regardless of our age.

In these days of overly expressed agency, it seems to me that giving more attention to the communion that binds us together as one would help extend the feelings of togetherness that we feel so strongly at this time of year throughout the rest of the year.

May 2009 unfold for you one an all as a truly great year!

The The Hobgoblin of Lazy Marketing and Research Minds

For those who don’t click through to comments on yesterday’s post, I feel I must repeat here Ronni Bennett’s comment about the use (and misuse) of generational labels:

This is a topic that irritates me at the other end of the generational divide. Elders - by which I mean anyone older than Boomers - have been erased from existence by the media which have been using "boomer" as a synonym for "old" for several years. But elders' needs and interests differ dramatically from all but the very oldest boomers as you have pointed out here in the past in your posts on Carl Jung's seven tasks of aging, among others. And boomers too can hardly be lumped together. The youngest are still raising families, saving for their kids' college educations and beginning to hit the peaks of the their careers - a very different life-outlook from the oldest boomers just now reaching the age of eligibility for early Social Security. Generational naming and references seem to me to be the hobgoblin of lazy marketing - and research - minds.

Ronni’s second sentence bears deep reflection. In it she calls attention to the fact that people older than boomers are being marginalized. For years, I’ve heard an endless stream of complaints from those working in older markets about everyone dying at age 50 according to Madison Avenue. Until recently, reports on media consumption did not cover media usage by people 50 and older. AARP mockingly derided this fact with a controversial add showing people turning 50 being stuffed into body bags.

Now, many of those who long criticized Madison Avenue for ignoring consumers 50 and older are doing the same thing by writing off people who are older than boomers. Ronni is squarely on target with her protest of this development. Now re-read her last sentence:

Generational naming and references seem to me to be the hobgoblin of lazy marketing - and research - minds.

Neither she nor I claim that differences between generations don’t exist. They do. But those differences tend to be more a matter of style than of substance. Sixty-two-year-old boomers today have the same core needs as their 62-year-old grandparents had. The former simply have more options in seeking satisfaction of those needs.

I can rightfully claim to be well-read in adult development psychology. I have never come across any developmental psychologist who claimed that generational differences exist at comparable ages. Now, we have brain scientists fortifying this idea. Experience shapes brains in a number of somewhat predictable ways. The more years of experience a person has, the more different his or her brain is from people half as old. But the differences fade when comparisons are made with age peers.

Changes in the brain’s architecture generate changes in the brain’s cognitive processes as well as in the worldviews, order of values and strategies for needs satisfaction that emerge from brain processes. These are not generation specific. They are developmental stage specific.

Today, countless companies are basing marketing decisions on poorly grounded claims about generational attributes. Yesterday, I read an article talking about the demise of the Sigrid Olsen fashion brand. The articles said:

"It is a curious development in the fickle business of fashion that clothing labels like Ms. Olsen’s, made by and for the baby boomer generation, are among those being hardest hit by the current economic turmoil and retail retrenchment."

 It is not curious in the least – that labels by boomers ... “are among those hardest hit by the current economic turmoil and retail entrenchment.”

Few in the fashion game have come to terms with the twin facts that population growth under 50 is basically nada and that consumer spending reaches its peak around age 47 – interestingly, the average age a woman becomes a grandmother for the first time.

Boomers are at a different place in their existential evolution. Boomer women over 50 tend to be less consumed with fashion concerns than women of fewer years. That obviously has a suppressing effect on cash register ring-ups. The current economic downturn will of course adversely affect sales results. However, that is a short term phenomenon. Longer term is the effect of a steadily rising median age and close to zero population growth in the under-50 adult population. The answer to the challenges posed by this cannot be fruitfully addressed by basing analysis on attributes that supposedly distinguish a generation as being the only generation like it in all history.

As Ronni says, “Generational naming and references seem to me to be the hobgoblin of lazy marketing - and research - minds.”

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Ronni Bennett has two blogs, the longer sustaining of which is As Time Goes By: http://ronnibennett.typepad.com/ If you have any interest in middle age and older markets from any perspective you owe it to yourself to become a regular reader of this blog. Her second blog is mesmerizing. It’s called The Elder Storytelling Place: http://www.ronnibennett.typepad.com/elderstorytelling/

I promise you that over time you will learn more about the worldviews, values and behavior of older people – boomers or otherwise – by reading these two blogs on a regular basis than by reading, shall we say, 90 percent of the research executed in the name of boomers, Generation X or whatever.

 

The Mythology of Millennials

I just finished reading a posting on the corporate blog of a research firm that I really respect. But this posting did nothing to extend that respect. It was more drivel about Millennials, surely the most confusedly-defined generation of all.

Before getting into the details of why this posting was so disappointing, it’s worth sampling the wide variations in how Millennials are defined. On the first page of a Google search, eight out of the first 20 postings disagreed on how many Millennials there are. The population count ranged from 70 million to 100 million.

As to the calendrical bookends indicated in another Google search, the lack of consistency was astonishing. Wikipedia says Millennials were born “between the early 1980s to the early 1990s.” That would yield a Millennial population of around 48 to 58 million – notwithstanding the research company blog’s claim that “Millennials account for the largest generation in U.S.history. (Boomers, you’ll remember, are generally sized at around 78 million.)

A sampling of the calendrical bookends of the Millennial cohort as indicated by the first 20 Google listings:

1984 – 1993: 9 years

1982- 1998: 16 years

1982 – 2001: 19 years

1982 – 2003: 21 years

One “expert” in the Google listings thinks Millennials are still being born.

Now this is what I want to know: How can we trust generalities about Millennials when there isn’t even any consensus about when they were born and how many there are?

By my lights, whether a discussion is about boomers, Gen X’ers or Millennials, the subject of generations is riddled with intellectual slovenliness. That is the deeper problem I have with the blog that inspired this post.

The author of the research companies post on Millennials held up the 16-year-old high schooler in the recent movie Juno as the quintessential Millennial:

“Upon finding herself pregnant, (Juno) demonstrates remarkably little agony or angst in her decision to move forward with her pregnancy and give the baby up for adoption. She considers her situation, briefly weighs the options, and proceeds with far more poise and peace of mind than most couples at the altar …we never find Juno rethinking or otherwise agonizing over her decision.”

The implication is that Millennials are preternaturally mature for teenagers. Supposedly, according to the blog writer, Millennials quickly size up a matter, take decisive action on it and move on without looking back. But perhaps Juno is more like teenagers in every generation in recorded history: unable to assess the full consequences of situations as dramatically framed as sexual intercourse that just happened because she was bored when a boy friend came over to her house after school. Handing off the baby that resulted was not proof of maturity but of a desire to avoid responsibility for a life carelessly conceived.

Recent brain scan research shows the 16-year-old mind to be far less developed than once believed. It has another decade or so of development ahead before scientists are comfortable saying a person’s brain has fully developed. Brain scans show remarkable indifference to subtle distinctions between conditions and objects. One study showed teens to be poor readers of facial expressions, unable to determine expressions of anger from expressions of sadness in photos shown them while they were in a fMRI scanning process. Adults seeing the same pictures had no such difficulty.

The blog writer seems unaware of the processes and states of adolescent development, yet unabashedly makes claims about Millennials’ developmental states with the voice of authority.

The writer states with no hint of equivocation:

Today's Millennials are coming of age in a postmodern world which encourages consumption with playful, reckless abandon — it's likely they will be consuming at levels relatively higher than their predecessors. Believe it or not, in the future we'll all likely be buying more stuff and our youth will lead the charge.

Now, he/she purports that statement to be supported by a report you can buy for $500.00. However, I have seen much research that falls victim to what a friend calls “specious correlations.” By that he means something like this: A man about to enter his office building one day sees a bedraggled figure on the street corner rapidly snapping his fingers over a box at his feet with a few coins in it. Overcome with curiosity the office worker walks over to the fidgeting vagrant to ask him what he’s doing.

“Keeping tigers away.”

“But there are no tigers here.”

“Yep. That’s right. I’m keeping them away.”

I presume that the basic findings in the report on Millennials’ behavior are accurate abstractions of reality, but I suspect that a number of conclusions drawn are based more on specious correlations.

As I have said before in this space, I have fathered 3 boomers, 2 Gen X’ers and 1 Millennial. As expected, they are all different, but at the same time, they all went through the same stages, with pretty much the same worldviews and very much the same needs. And as I have also said in this space, the partitioning of the population into generational groupings is fraught with peril. Yes, generations do differ in style, but not in substance. Changes in technology, culture and opportunities for self expression have been a constant fact of life since the Dark Ages. But the underlying needs of people are the same today as they were in Elizabethan England. It would do you well to keep that in mind the next time someone tells you about how _______ (fill in the generation name) are different – really different!

The Silent Generation Revisited

Reader Anita Landis of the GlynnDevins ad agency in Overland Park, Kansas sent me the URL to an article on the Silent Generation that ran in the June 29, 1970 issue of Time. I found the article by Time Associate Editor Gerald Clarke fascinating from several perspectives.

First, it was written by a member of the Silent Generation who had bought into the idea that it was every bit as different as the first article on the subject claimed. That was Time’s cover story on November 5, 1951.

Second, the 1970 article cited a number of ways in which the Silent Generation was different contained a number of that are also being used today to show how Generation Y or Millenials are different from previous generations.

For example, Clarke who was 32 (three years year older than I was then) at the time wrote:

• We were incapable of hero worship. Those we most admired, in fact, were not real heroes but the anti-heroes of fiction or film: the Jake Barnes of The Sun Also Rises or the Humphrey Bogart of Casablanca.
• For us, coolness was all. Like Holden Caulfield, the confused but knowing teen-age protagonist of J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye —the novel that became the decade's literary touchstone — we detested anything that we felt was phony.
• Only today, in our 30s, do we know that we were different—fundamentally different. When the generation lines began to form, we discovered, to our own surprise, that we did not automatically side with our parents.
• We may be the only ones left in American society who can see what's great and what's bull," says Frank Conroy, 34, the author of Stop-Time.

Cannot those descriptions be applied to Gen Y’ers?

Yes, the so-called Silent Generation was different. But is was also the same. When doing a comparative analysis of generational differences, it is wise to separate true differences from apparent differences which aren’t differences after all.

Aside from citing apparent differences as real differences, Clarke did do a worthy job of capturing the behavioral essence of the last generation to come of age before television became a ubiquitous fact of life in America. I know. I was there as a fellow Silent Generation type trying to resolve the great moral gap between my parent’s generation and the incoming boomer generation.

Interesting read, Clarke’s piece, when you get a moment.

 

 

 

 

On Sloppy Scholarship and the Silent Generation

Sloppy scholarship sometimes makes me mad. I especially get upset when it shows up in a widely esteemed newspaper like the New York Times. Why? Because many people in important positions will take on faith claims made in the great gray lady of U.S. journalism irrespective of their accuracy or lack thereof.

Last Sunday’s editorial section carried such piece. It was titled, “When the Time Make the Man."

In it, editorial page editor Sam Tanenhaus poses the possibility that “Americans born in the 1930s lack the particular qualities we look for in our national leaders.”

I guess that pretty much takes care of presidential candidate John McCain's hopes. He was born in 1936.

McCain is a member of the Silent Generation – so called because it has failed to distinguish itself in the political life of America.

Full disclosure: I was born in 1933.

The problem with the Silents, says Tanenhaus, is that they were collectively disengaged from politics and distrustful of ideology. Just look at Edward Kennedy and Michael Dukakis Tanenhaus offers up as Exhibit A in making his claim about the congenitally weak leadership that marks those born in the 1930s.

If the reputation of the boomer generation has been hyperinflated, then the reputation of the Silent Generation has been as flat as yesterday’s beer. Tanenhaus completely disregards such nationally prominent – indeed, globally prominent in many cases – leaders as Martin Luther King (a fellow Silent, though born in 1929), Ralph Nader (1934), Tom Hayden (1939), Jerry Rubin (1938), Jane Fonda (1937), Abby Hoffman (1936), and Gloria Steinem (1934). In fact, nearly all the national leaders in the feminist movement of the 1960s and ‘70s were born in the 1930s.

You might not have liked the politics of those figures were you around and involved in the 1960s and ‘70s, but you can’t deny their status as national leaders. Collectively, they reshaped the politics and morals of the nation.

From the other end of the spectrum come such national leaders as James Baker (1930), Colin Powell (1937), and Donald Rumsfeld (1932).

A Wikipedia entry on has this to say about the Silent Generation:

In the book Boom Bust and Echo, Canadian author David Foot takes a different perspective on this group arguing that those born in the 1930s and early 1940s are the most successful generation. He argues that because so few people were born during the depression and the war that employment opportunities were abundant and this group quickly rose to the top and became the management and superiors of the great mass of baby boomers that came after them. Using economic indicators he finds that 1938 was the best year to be born in North America, in terms of economic success. The impact of the generation was also great culturally, as the musicians and thinkers such as Paul McCartney, John Lennon and Bob Dylan who shaped the fashions of the boomers and were often associated with the pop culture of the 1960s and 1970s.

In sum, Sam Tanenhaus’s take on the Silent Generation is unpardonable balderdash. But unfortunately, it reflects the sort of sloppy scholarship seen in the gross generalizations we suffer about boomers, and subsequent generations. Interestingly, no broadly accepted definition of how many years add up to a generation exists. Some references to Generation X mark its bookends as 1965 to 1976 – just 11 years.

Lack of consistency in how many years mark a generation doesn’t seem to bother those who insist on comparing generations in terms of buying power, worldviews and behavior.

The key take-away point of this post is beware of generational generalities. They have about as much utility in analyzing, planning and making marketing decisions as a fork has for eating soup.

For another critique of Sam Tanenhaus’s article see the Boston Globe’s Brainiac entry.

 

 

Strategies for Surviving and Thriving in Challenging Times

Strategic Action #4 for Surviving and Thriving:

Connect With the Zeitgeist (Part 6)

Over the nearly four years I’ve maintained this blog I’ve talked about the psychological center of gravity hypothesis (PCG) several times. (Type “PCG” into the search box in the left column to get a listing of all references to the PCG in this blog.)

The PCG hypothesis holds that people within five years of the adult median age have a disproportionate influence on the zeitgeist. With today’s adult median age pegged at 47, the bookend years of the current PCG are 42 and 52.

For a very long time the American culture was described as a youth culture. Indeed, many in the marketing community continue projecting in their work a belief that youth still propels the wheels of consumer commerce.

To the degree that youth remains a factor in setting the trends and styles in the marketplace, it does so with a decidedly middle aged bent. It is as though members of so-called Generation Y - also often called “Millennials” - jumped into a midlife psychosocial milieu as they morphed from tweenage to teenage.

Millennials are generally regarded as those born between 1981 and 2000.

Though virtually always unconsciously so, consumer trend researchers and analysts widely describe Millennials in terms traditionally used by adult development psychologists to describe behavioral attributes of people in midlife.

Descriptions of Millennials in a 2006 USA article bear out that:

•61% of 13- to 25-year-olds feel personally responsible for making a difference in the world, suggests a survey of 1,800 young people to be released today. It says 81% have volunteered in the past year; 69% consider a company's social and environmental commitment when deciding where to shop, and 83% will trust a company more if it is socially/environmentally responsible. Two Boston-based companies, Cone Inc. and AMP Insights — suggests these millennials are "the most socially conscious consumers to date."

•Young people want to help their country by working for the government, suggests another study by the international consulting firm Universum Communications.

•Two-thirds of college freshmen (66%) believe it's essential or very important to help others in difficulty, suggests a survey of 263,710 students at 385 U.S. colleges and universities. The 2005 report, by the Higher Education Research Institute found feelings of social and civic responsibility among entering freshmen at the highest level in 25 years.

Those descriptions hardly conform to stereotypical images of youth as consumed by self-entered aspirations and behavior. “Giving back” has long been regarded as more characteristic of people in midlife and beyond. It seems that many Millennials project a disposition to “give back” before they have gotten.

According to the testimony of many researchers who study what is arguably the most coddled generation in history -  Millennials project in their jobs to an unusual degree for the young the confidence of seasoned career veterans that transcends the characteristic cockiness of youth. There, and in life in general, they have been reported as reflecting optimism that is grounded less in the fantasies of the young than in practical assessments of the world such as middle aged adults are more likely to have.

Millennials, researchers who study them tell us, have a strong disposition toward promoting the common good. They operate with perhaps the most inclusive worldview of any generation - young or old - in history. According to developmental theorists such Abraham Maslow and Erik Erikson, the worldviews of the young tend to be exclusionary and peer-focused. You are either IN or OUT when you are young. It is people who are at higher levels of personal development that are likelier to reflect a more inclusionary worldview. Except Millennials widely reflect such a disposition today.

Millennials also appear to generally reflect less antagonism toward their parents’ generation than seen among boomers and Generation X in their youth. This is in line with predictions by Millennials Rising authors Neil Howe and Bill Strauss. In 1997 they said that Millennial kids would “enter their teens looking and behaving better than any in decades....This generation will build a reputation for meeting and beating adult expectations.”

Howe, Strauss and others attribute Millennials’ worldviews and behavior to such events as an age of more attentive parents, the Internet and other technologies, and 9/11 among other obvious events. However, I believe that biggest single factor influencing Millennials' worldviews and behavior is the zeitgeist which has its roots in the worldviews of middle aged and older people.

The U.S. is no longer a youth-dominated society. With adults 40 and older outnumbering 16-39-year-olds by 137 million to 93 million, it could be no other way than that the zeitgeist is a bit hoary and reflects the seasoned outlook of the New Adult Majority.

The practical, take-away conclusion from this is that even marketers who work exclusively in youth and young adult markets should take time to understand the worldviews and behavior of people in the current PCG because they are the source of many of the influences shaping the behavior of Millennials.