Marketers seduced by generational glasses

Does your year of your birth really hold the key to your buying habits and to how you approach your work? Many marketers are adamant that it does, and the results of their work back it up. However, some studies have found that Orangina drinkers or introverts of different ages have more in common with one another than people from the same generation.

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The notion of generational cohort was first introduced as a sociological tool for tracking social change and intergenerational dynamics. Over time, it became entrenched in popular culture turning into its own caricature, brought down to a hunt for differences across generations.

Notably, research on generational cohorts has not produced a set of uncontested definitions. Different studies introduce different names and timelines. Some even posit more generational groups than others. The way generations are exploited in business practice is a shambles too. The table below shows the different timelines utilized by four different companies:

A decade back or so, Poland was gripped with a fascination with Gen Y. The millennials, as they came to be known, became the apple of the eye of marketers, who wanted their brands to be young and fresh, in synch with the current trends and the tastes of the new consumers. The media was awash with titles screaming Gen Y. We witnessed a kind of freak show in which warnings of doom looming on the horizon due to ever-worsening productivity and the millennials’ entitled mindset combined with hopes for humanity’s salvation owing to the millennials’ pro-eco attitudes and other ideas popular among them. Gradually, this type of simplification began to seep into brand communications, becoming more of a cultural code than actual data-based findings.

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Can generational generalization be harmful?

As the focus shifted onto the letter Z, things became bumpier, but never fear, you can always start all over again. Enter the Alpha generation.

The Alphas turned 13 last year according to one timeline, the age when one is allowed to set up profiles on many social media, such as TikTok or Facebook.

More likely than not, many brands have a communication strategy ready for the occasion, roping in the usual suspects such as TikTok and Facebook (as the second choice, I believe) in addition to new kids on the social media block. So, brace yourself for another barrage of generational generalization, except that for the first time in history a generational cohort will be growing up amid noisy messages telling them who they are.

This is what makes looking at the generational segmentation a worthwhile pursuit. Are there potential dangers involved? I believe there are. Numerous psychological studies have shown that communication generalizations can cause harm to young people.

The talk about generations can adversely affect individuals. A series of studies led by Joshua Grubbs showed that adolescents and young adults were well aware of the media portraying them as privileged and narcissistic and many of them believed that the portrayal was accurate. This only exacerbated the stereotypes that had always stemmed from the friction between children and their parents and grandparents. And I don’t mean the familiar ?those were the days” here, but the constant labelling.

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Do ?old” brands find it easy to vie for young audiences?

All brands with a long history find it challenging to retain a fresh feel and to appeal to younger buyers. These brands take steps to avoid being labelled as ?OK, boomer”, a label that inevitably leads to being dismissed as irrelevant.

Many marketing campaigns have been designed to elude this trap. Notable American examples include ?Not Your Father’s Oldsmobile” (1988) or, much more recently, ?Not Yours Mother’s Tiffany” (2021).

In the late 1980s, Oldsmobile badly wanted to shake off its image as a maker of dull cars for senior citizens, leading to one of the most bizarre advertising campaigns launched by a Detroit car maker. The idea was to film spots with a handful of celebrity has-beens and their children, who were not household names at the time.

The idea itself was not a bad one, but the execution alienated all possible audiences, leaving the brand users embarrassed while the young audience found the message as convincing as Steve Buscemi’s character’s words to high school students ?How do you do, fellow kids?” that found their way into a famous meme. Years later, some credited the campaign with hastening the company’s demise.

The former fame of the parents appearing in the spots turned out to be irrelevant, which may provide a case for those who argue that generational analysis is about ensuring relevancy. ?Not Your Mother’s Tiffany”, the more recent of the two campaigns referenced above, relies heavily on reports on what young women find fashionable and relevant. And it sends a rebellious message to boot.

The campaign posters omitted mothers and featured only daughters but both the posters and the social media content soon came under fire. The brand’s loyal customers felt offended with many young people joining the chorus of critical voices. Responses like Leave my mother out of this!!!? were seen scribbled on the posters. Some claimed that the content was created in a calculated move to generate hype, but many experts voiced harsh criticism, pointing out that the message was ?against” something, focusing on generational conflict rather than supporting something or building relationships underpinned by shared beliefs.

The ads were an attempt to capture a certain age-old societal tension. The question is how this relates to the enduring constructs of generational cohorts, which, increasingly often, are defined in isolation from the life stage of the people in question. Is this all just the question of the friction between the young and the old?

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Do people change with age?

The early years of this decade saw more critical approaches to the meaning accorded to generations and generational cohorts. I will gloss over the fact that a rather narrow Anglophone concept was transferred to many different countries, of which some had extremely different political and economic landscapes.

2021 saw the publication of the book Generation Myth, in which sociologist Bobby Duffy says that the notion of generational cohorts can be helpful in understanding certain phenomena but not as much as it has come to be believed. In addition to the question of generations, he discusses the historical context and different life stages, i.e. how people tend to change as they age.

His overall conclusion, arrived at through the analysis of a vast amount of data, is that people from distinct age groups are far more alike than it is generally thought, and that the generational perspective is promoted by a whole new sector that has developed around it.

Duffy claims that 10 years ago US companies spent $70 million on generational consulting in the context of workforce but that there are no proven workplace-related differences across generations. He also notes that there is no evidence supporting the claim that higher suicides rates or lower sexual activity are limited to the young people. In fact, these tendencies have been observed across the entire population in both the US and UK.

BBH Labs ’s analyses made even a bigger splash. The organization created a similarity index based on the UK’s 2019 TGI (Target Group Index) data about the products and services bought by consumers and the media they use. Following its publication, many marketing media carried headlines saying that average nut eaters have far more in common with each other than the members of the Z Gen.

I often observed how passions and habits affect similarities within groups when examining a number of communities as part of my netnographic research. I noticed fatigue with having to be constantly present on social media and to compete with others by posting appealing photographs and with a dependance on online interactions.

The opposite of the more familiar FOMO (fear of missing out), the JOMO (joy of missing out) is the joy derived from disengagement but it does not preclude digital activities. Surprisingly enough, JOMO can work well online for those who play vintage games without chasing newly released titles, or engage in social media activities that are a throwback to the good old forums: anonymous, topic-focused, fostering passions or reflection. Such communities can function brilliantly across generations. Their members avoid discussing generational pigeonholing and bond through shared interests or life experiences.

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On lenses and glasses: a new way of looking at things

Noticing ever more gaps in the functioning of cohorts, even the companies that pioneered generational research and ran numerous generation-related workshops and studies have begun reconsidering their approach.

Last year, the Pew Research Center made an announcement that sent ripples across wide areas of business and research communities. Noting that the field of generational research had become a crowded arena, the Centre pointed out that it had spawned a whole new sector serving up clickbait or marketing mythology on generational segments.

The Center announced it would no longer do generational analysis without historical data allowing it to compare generations at similar stages of life, and it would consider additional environmental factors (beyond age) to make generational comparisons. Its intention is to use lenses that are better suited for studying specific issues without rigidly adhering to generational labels that are known to have led to oversimplification and stereotyping.

It is obvious that we look at the world through certain glasses that affect our perceptions. Anthropologist Franz Boas coined the term ?cultural glasses” to refer to the fact that no one perceives reality as it is, or in the same way as others. We tend to consider some ways of seeing the world as prejudiced and to overlook the fact that our own outlook can get distorted by our cultural glasses.

Many marketers have come to believe that their target groups are wearing generational glasses rather than cultural ones or that the segments tagged with the different letters can be seen as monoliths. The truth, however, is that the generational glasses are now firmly planted on the noses of the marketers themselves. Over time, they have ceased to be noticed, leading to misleading observations and conclusions that can inform wrong business decisions.

So, what can we do? The reasonable thing to do would be to shed the generational glasses and look at the particular groups with more curiosity and reflection without over-isolating them from the rest of society or accentuating the differences which on closer inspection often prove to be illusory.