Questioning Received Wisdom

I recently had an insight into how far we have wavered off the path. In a marketing group I am the admin of, young members often call older members ‘uncle’ or use the derogatory term “Okay, Boomer”. To be honest, the first few times I heard this expression, I felt angry. However, as it usually happens, my logical brain took over from my emotional brain and I decided to look up the age group associated with Boomers. It turns out that Baby Boomers are people born between 1946 and 1964. So that means the youngest possible Boomer is about 56 and the chances of a person of that age being part of our group are not that high.

This incident helped reinforce my views about the hype surrounding Millennials and their potential as a separate marketing segment. It lacks a lot of substance. As the TV host Adam Conover explained at an American marketing conference, Millennials don’t exist. Before you turn away incredulous or put this down to me not being a part of the age group and not being in touch with young people and their needs and wants, you would be surprised to know that as a 43-year-old, in some classifications, people born in 1977 (like myself) are included as Millennials instead of the usual 1980-2000 slot.

So why are marketers blindly following something that is ambiguous at best? Sadly, because although we know that marketing is about being proactive, it is in fact one of the most reactive professions in the world. Don’t get me wrong, I love marketing and advertising but facts are facts.

From technology to psychology to economics, marketing is impacted by these disciplines; it is reactive because marketing follows the learnings received from them and because of facades and pretence of competency, few marketers question the status quo. As Conover said, generations get their names from a group of scientists or researchers who carry out a study and then there is a sort of weeding out process as rival names jockey for popularity to become the common currency. This is exactly what happened with the now ubiquitous term, Millennials.

The term beat competing names and became the established one for people born between 1980 and 2000, or 1977 and 2000 depending on which classification you follow – or if you follow the Pew Research, between 1981 and 1996. In fact, this term was ‘coined’ in 1991 when the Millennials were, well, still kids. Two men, Neil Howe and William Strauss, published a book called Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069 – they started writing this book in the eighties and are credited with coming up with the term Millennials.

Based on the amazing past record of ‘experts’ predicting the future, the people who rejected the airplane for combat, the people who said that by 2000 we would have flying cars and those who said that by 2013, robots would be working in media planning functions (replacing people in the process), I find it a bit naïve to accept that Strauss and Howe got it ‘right’. Possible scenarios are that having been exposed to the conditioning expressed by their theory, Millennials became part of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Now that we have more information about where these terms came from and how we ‘define’ our generations (a generation is usually accepted as around 30 years), the next question is why do we need these segments? The answer, as any first year marketing student will tell you, is so that we can talk to people more effectively, target them better and customise our products to suit them. So yes it is a good idea to have classifications. However, as with SEC in Pakistan, the knowledge possessed and the ability to use these classifications is hazy. My interpretation of SEC A and yours may differ. Another question to ask is that if a group can be demographically similar, can they be homogenous psycho-graphically? Even when we talk about demographics, is the 20-year-old urban Pakistani similar to his or her rural counterpart? What about someone living in the metro cities and someone living in Vehari?

Talking about Millennials is all the rage, but who are we actually talking about? An article from NPR (and Adam Conover) reminds us, we are talking about young people who may or may not possess similar characteristics but who also differ from each other. Lumping people together is a dangerous exercise and gives rises to misunderstanding and division, and not surprisingly, leading to expressions like “Okay, Boomer” as well as blaming Millennials for a lot of things and labelling them as narcissistic. The example of how Lego discovered that kids do not have the attention spans of goldfish when they are interested and will put in long hours for something they love, warns us about believing, spreading and, even worse, acting on stereotypes that influence and condition millions of people around the world.

It may seem a lot to ask people to question more and follow blindly less considering we are still teaching and using the outdated Maslow’s hierarchy with self actualisation at the top, whereas his updated one has transcendence at the top. In fact, Maslow didn’t even intend a pyramid; that was the interpretation given by a person who was preparing a model of Maslow’s.

So we need to start questioning and social media is making it all the more necessary. It seems ironic how we seem ready to tear down structures like patriarchy but are content to keep others in place, such as a flawed global education system. It is a prerequisite for good marketers to question. In fact please do your research and question the views I am presenting here. Evaluate them for yourself and decide.

Another reason to be wary of trends in marketing is the possible effect on the bottom line. If a marketer wants something more than anything else it is to stand out or have his or her marketing campaigns stand out and succeed and in that vein, questioning the ‘facts’ we have been told about Millennials may even give a savvy marketer, a competitive advantage. We crave the ability to talk to our audience in a better way than our competing brands and to be honest most of us are creating clutter. What could be more effective than talking to people in their own language and not treating them as members of a stereotypical group? The great, late musician Aamir Zaki, reminded us that “people are people” and Conover spoke about how the people we pigeonhole into different generations have in fact a lot in common; perhaps more in common than what separates us.

It’s time for marketers to bridge the real generation gap and stop subscribing to labelling and stereotypes.

Tyrone Tellis is a marketing professional working in Pakistan. tyrone.tellis@gmail.com