Marketers Should Stop Treating Millennials Like Self-Absorbed Tattooed Whiners

If marketers want to make any progress at all, it's time to murder the myths about millennials and actually get to know us. 

Myth #1: Millennials are narcissistic. Fact: We are hyper aware of our image.

To our generation, image is everything. You can call it shallow, but the reality is, the mirror in our society got huge with the advent of social media. In previous generations, it felt great to walk through high school with a great hair day. In our generation, the reaction isn't just who's in your biology class; it's who lives in Bangladesh and happened to click on #beardgang (social media hashtag for men with beards).

Of course with that heightened image-consciousness comes a lot of accusations from older generations. We're called narcissists and materialists. Look at my Instagram, and it would be easy to call me those things. But what I publish on social media is only a part of myself. It's something that I can (and do) control carefully. Millennials have grown up in an era where the internet forgets nothing. Why call us narcissists for caring about what it remembers? 

Instead, marketers have an opportunity to be an ally in the image game.

To read more millennial myth-busters -- check out my latest over at CNBC!