BLOWING UP THINGS : LIFESTAGES NOT GENERATIONS

Dave McCaughan loves to “blow things up” ?… no 1. in a new series

?Maybe it is because I am now “a veteran” or I have been around way too long in the advertising/marketing/market research world but some things just don’t sit well with me.

For example I have never understood why we call the research we should always do first, the most important research, the desk research “secondary”. It should be primary … always.

For example I have never understood the qual/quant, subjective/objective debate. All market research is subjective, we design hypotheses, questions, procedures for analysis … therefore it’s all subjective.

For example I have not understood the relatively recent over use of the term “insights”. Not all, indeed most research has no “insight”. Learning, data, substantiation, thought starters yes … but an insight is much more rare.

All these and others I will be happy to deal with in future editions of the research pulse wire, but for today let me explain a myth and a better way to think about what matters to people.

You have all heard the term “Generation X”? And I will bet, based on my having asked many audiences this question, that almost none have read the original novel “Generation X” by Douglas Coupland. I did. Way back in 1992 when it was a best seller around the world. A snappy title. A very clever book. It was a novel that included dozens of “boxed” quotes defining new slang terms that were supposed to be the way cool young people of the time talked. Terms like “Squirming”, “ultra short-term nostalgia”, or my favourite “brazilification” (no, nothing to do with trimming of pubic hair, it referred to the widening gulf between rich and poor and the disappearance of the middle class … oh whoops, isn’t that something we thought was so 2020s??).

The novel was really about 3 dropouts who share a house in Las Vegas, work very low-end jobs and seem to have no vision, future or ambition. A fun read made more fun by all those new words and phrases.

And that is where we, the marketing and research world, got it wrong.

This was a novel of clever observations and even more clever use of “original language” (ask me about that elsewhere). It was not a survey report or a piece of research. It was certainly not a prescription for everyone born within the years roughly 1964-1981 in the USA, let alone globally.

Who told me that? Well actually it was the author, Douglas Coupland when I had lunch with him at a conference, we were both speaking at in Pittsburgh a year after the book was released. His comment was something along the lines of … “I am disappointed some lazy marketers and businesspeople have adopted the term without reading my novel or understanding this was a representation of only a small section of today’s youth”.

But lazy as an industry we are. And the genie was out of the bottle. We love to grab shorthand quick terms and generalise them. So suddenly in the early 90s Gen X v Baby Boomers became a thing, then Z, Y, Alpha etc etc. All way too simplistic, all way to shallow.

But at last people are starting to rethink. I was soooo happy to see that the Pew organisation announced recently it would no longer use “generation descriptors” to divide audiences. And as I spend more time looking in to and talking about lifestages as the key thinking about what matters to people it is fortunately getting more and more traction.

Because when you look at the research lifestages just make more sense.

Go back and look at research over the decades. I have. I have been collecting “youth research” going back to the 1950s. Yes the “tactics change” ( favourite band, clothes, games etc ) but the themes are the same. They want to stand apart from their parents generation, they want to “rebel” in some way. 8 decades of pretty much the same motivations, desires and hopes. A while ago someone collected TIME magazine covers from the 70s until ten years ago that displayed “big” stories that said people in their early 20s were, well, all “me” generations. Not just today’s avocado eaters. Mums and dads? well whether born in 1956 ( that’s me ) or 2006 ( as some unusually young mums for today’s world are ) the habits and wishes and wants don’t change much.

Yes, things like cultural factors and economic development will have an effect. But being of a “generation” is way to broad and silly to really be measured against. In reality maybe PEW’s recent statement is probably more correct. They say they are now no longer using “generational” tags simply because they think they encourage people to “live up to the societal view” of a generation rather than reflect who they are.

Of course I can talk all day about the 7 lifetstages … next time I will spend more time on them. For now … please don’t generalise generations.

Got an issue? … let Dave blow it up

Dave McCaughan

Storyteller @ https://bibliosexual.weebly.com/

WANT MORE ON THIS ... open, listen to, follow the podcast series "what Matters to People" that i am recording with Steve Sowerby where each episode looks at one of the lifestages with the help of incredibly smarter than us guests like Yatsu Kaori Dominic Carter Mark Earls Patrick Newell Shannon Kalayanamitr ? Denyse Drummond-Dunn ????? Trevor Gore ( the last 2 to be our guests next week ) ... you can see them here https://www.youtube.com/@xpotential1594/videos