“Millennials” Don’t Exist

People like to stereotype.

Men love sports. Blonde women are less intelligent. Asians are good at math. Children don’t like eating vegetables. Brits running small business marketing companies make for better lovers.

Apart from the obvious racial, gender, and ageist bigotry of the above examples (apart from the last example, which is 100% true) making assumptions based on stereotypes is never a good look. If I get bitten by a dog, clearly I’m wrong to assume every pooch I meet in the future is going to bite me. If I get food poisoning from eating gas station sushi – never a wise decision – it shouldn't mean I’m destined to spend my life avoiding all forms of raw fish for the rest of my life.

Bad Marketers Are Stereotypers

Marketers are often the biggest culprits of stereotyping, since they confuse it with “segmentation.” In marketing, you can often get away with murder as long as you have data that supports your position. If I said to you that pink is for girls and blue is for boys, you’ll (quite rightly) brand me as an out-of-touch sexist imbecile. If, however, I showed you research where sales of pink cellphones were predominantly purchased by women, while blue ones were mostly bought by men, you’d call me an insightful marketer.

In marketing, audience segmentation underpins pretty much everything. Unless you truly know and understand your audience it’s almost impossible to present a relevant, resonant, and memorable value message.

But an audience segment isn’t “women under 50”, any more than assuming “anyone owning a dog” is a prospective customer for your canine-only taxi service with Google Home integration and Augmented Reality companion app.

There’s No Such Thing As A “Millennial”

Which brings me to the current ‘shiny thing’ distraction in marketing: the fallacy that “Millennial” exists as a customer segment.

Sure, if we're talking about a statistical percentile of the global population, then millennials clearly exist. Globally there are around two billion men and women born between the years of 1981 and 2000. But by what stretch of the imagination can anyone conclude these people share any particular characteristics with each other? Moreover that they, in some way, exhibit fundamentally different behavioral characteristics to people in other age ranges?

Are millennials politically more left-wing (or right-wing) than their Gen-X or Baby Boomer parents? Are they more affluent? Less materialistic? For every study you find confirming any of the above, I’ll find you one refuting it. Not only that, but I’ll find you similar empirical evidence for pretty much any age group you care to mention.

As well as running our marketing agency, I teach a marketing class to final-year university students. Every one of them was born in the 1990s. They shop online, constantly check their social media channels, use WhatsApp, Snapchat, email, and Skype, and value ‘experiences’ over material objects.

You know who else does all of that? My 72 year-old mother, and my 82 year-old father-in-law. Neither of whom would ever contemplate eating avocado on toast.

Don’t Market to “Millennials.” Market to “People”

A ‘millennial’ isn’t a marketing segment or buyer persona. Actually, you could view such stereotyping as being just as short-sighted as any other sexist or racist generalization you care you mention.

How about marketing home psychology study courses specifically to Cancerians, since they’re apparently more empathic and intuitive than other astrological signs? Why not target your new creative drawing class specifically to left-handed people since, apparently, they’re more creative than us righties?

Just because you were born in, say, 1987 doesn’t inherently make you a better user of Instagram than someone born in the 1960s. Assuming otherwise is prejudicial.

How about, instead of being lazy and determining a buyer’s habits on when they were born, we actually created messaging that spoke to people instead of age-ranges?

( first published on the KEXINO marketing blog )