Marketing to the Millennial and iGen Consumers: The Role of Content

Generational Change and Consumer Behaviour

With time, newer generations replace older generations, and this also applies to the consumer market. Each generation differs from the prior generations, shaped by unique combinations of impacting realities of their respective formative years, over separate time periods. These differences manifest as unique decision-making considerations of each generation of consumers.

Meet the Millennial Consumer

Generally accepted as the demographic group born on the cusp of the millennium’s turn, the Millennial Generation is the group of individuals born between 1980 and the year 2000. Assuming the threshold age of adulthood as 21, the Millennial Generation reaches maturity in the year 2021, with its youngest member reaching entering adult life, thus rendering it as the main dominant consumer group by then, displacing Generation X. It is also the largest generation yet, in terms of numbers, and therefore presents a greater importance as well as opportunities to Marketers.

The Millennial Generation has grown up discovering and figuring out the fastest shortcuts to getting quick bite-sized precise answers to everything off Google or Wikipedia. Their thought-trains too are therefore, shaped as such. A curious bunch, the Millennials are accustomed to questioning everything, until they can either question no further or see no need for further questioning, so as to be satisfied, that they know enough about the subject matter that they need to make a decision about. This includes buying or purchasing decisions.

Meet the iGen Consumer

The iGen or “internet Generation” is the generation born immediately after the Millennials and after the normalisation of the internet being a part and parcel of the everyday human life through computing and mobile devices, including the Smartphones. In terms of time, this generation is made up of those born between 2001 to the present. Every teenager by 2021 will belong to this latest generation and therefore will be an important consideration for marketers.

The iGen is more impatient than the Millennials, because while the preceding generation has grown up experiencing the transition from accessing information through binary means to accessing it through digital means, for the iGen, information has virtually always been readily accessible wherever and whenever it has been required or desired, without limitations, through relatively refined digital means. For the same reasons, this is a generation better informed and with a more refined decision-making ability, in comparison to the Millennial Generation, let alone the yet older previous generations. The iGen is also viewed as a “lazy generation” by some, because they have mastered the means of finding the most essential information, most efficiently with the least effort, through their savvy for technological tools.

The New Generations and Technological Access

Both the Millennials and iGen do pretty much everything on platforms or through tools that are made feasible by the internet. They communicate through Data supported mobile applications. They seek entertainment content that is streamed online. They maintain ties, both personal and professional through online networks. They express themselves through blogs. They study and work through online means. They also shop and purchase online for everything from cinema tickets to holiday packages to groceries. Even if they do not necessarily make online purchases for certain products, they enquire and learn about products, different competing brands and retail outlets online. As the generations and technologies evolve, consumerism only going to further entrench itself, as an online or tech-dependent activity.

Growing up during the advent or after the advent of Information Technology, information is the key driver for the new generations of consumers, now or ahead. Content therefore, is at the central core of any marketing strategy effort therefore, for it to be effective, towards the two latest generations.

Marketing to the New Generations

To market the products to the iGen and Millennial consumers, the marketer needs to deliver information that they require for their decision making, the way they want that information, where they want it and when they want it. And to successfully make such a delivery, marketers need to employ the right mix of technology, information and creativity, to produce tailored content to effectively engage each individual consumer they need to be marketing to. Particularly, the Internet of Things will play the greatest role in facilitating such a mix ahead.

Through technology Marketers are gaining increasing access to individualised consumer information at an ever accelerating pace, down to the precise location of a consumer at any particular time, along with the opportunity to present live or interactive individualised content to each consumer, where that consumer is, through the communication platform or channel that best reaches that individual consumer. The best part about this whole process, is that it can be fully automated.

Through electronic or smart devices that are connected to the network, information about consumers is gathered through applications or platforms that the consumers use, before being fed to Marketing Information Systems that automatically process that information based on pre-set algorithms, to determine the most suitable automated response, in the form of content relay, which is then executed, as in content is relayed to the consumer without the consumer having to look for it.

As hi-tech as the process of marketing to the new generations may sound and as important as the role of the technologists supporting that process will be ahead, content still does and will hold the pivotal role, for a simple reason; all the technological evolution, integration and automation will be worthless, if the content does not appeal to and engage the consumers.

To appeal and engage to consumers ahead, the content will need to both be responsive to information about the consumers targeted as well as laden with information the targeted consumers will desire, presented in creative ways to hold their attentions without boring them. In short, relative to all other things they deal with, Marketers will have to deal with content, as King.

This article was originally written by Harish Shah for and was first published in the Jul-Sep 2016 issue of The Singapore Marketer, a marketing trade magazine in Singapore published by the Marketing Institute of Singapore. There may be grammatical differences herein from the version printed in The Singapore Marketer resulting from editing on the submitted version by the publisher. Herein is the original submitted version before and without the editing.

Harish Shah is Singapore's first local born Professional Futurist and a Management Strategy Consultant. He runs Stratserv Consultancy. His areas of consulting include Strategic Foresight, Marketing and Branding.