Friday, September 16, 2016

The term millennial is useless - agree. So is the term baby boomer

Marketing Week has an article entitled:  'Behaviour versus demographics: Why the term ‘millennial’ is useless'.  This is all about yet another segmentation model that uses patterns of behaviour and attitudes, rather than age and age groups.

Forrester is the originator of this new segmentation model. I have to say it looks amazingly similar to the ones I used over a decade ago. Guess if something is right in 2006 it is right in 2016.

I hoped that the lazy way of grouping people by age, giving them a title, be in baby boomer or millennial, and then dreaming up some characteristics that applies to all their behaviour was so obviously daft that it had been binned. I fear it hasn't.

I thought it was worth commenting on the model and it also gave me another opportunity to embed this brilliant video about millennials. OK, OK, I know I said you couldn't generalise or stereotype a whole generation but it is good fun trying.



Kim Walker sent me this article from Campaign about Millennials. I am not really sure what it is saying - in one breadth the author suggests that they have a set of common characteristics and then says they cannot be treated as a homogenous group.  The usual observation is made about their attachment to smartphones but that is not really telling us anything we didn't already know.

Undoubtedly, if you were only seeking to target Millennials then life would be a lot easier but most of the time that is not the case. Because of this I would focus on groups with a common set of behaviours rather than age. Dick Stroud



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