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Comment by roymurdock | Hacker News Reader

You don't work in marketing/advertising. Companies need to segment populations of consumers with similar characteristics to effectively advertise, tailor products, and sell to them. One of the most common demographic dividers is age. Different "generations" are grouped together because the members of their population exhibit similar income and expenditure patterns on average.

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Generation and age demographics are not the same thing though. Age demographics are constantly shifting and you go through several of them as you age and you situation changes, generations stick. Of course that means that a given generation will tend to go through the same stages at the same time but all generations went through the "kids" phase and the "teenager" phase at some point.

Generations are really a blunt and rather useless tool IMO. Besides "only 90's kids will remember this" memes.

Generations has been a concept long before marketing. I do wonder about who draws the line for where a generation begins/ends, but the concept is pretty clear: you are one generation, your children another, your parents another, your grandparents another. Hence the base word "generate".

Market research agencies draw the line nowadays and their terms get picked up in general lingo

Philosophers, novelists, sociologists, anthropologists, and economists used to define, study, and critique generational divides before advertising became such a pervasive part of the modern economy

Millennials, Gen X, and Gen Z don't seem to have been coined by market research agencies.

They rarely coin words into mainstream lingo. But they are uniquely positioned with their data streams to detect trends as they are happening. And they will happily co-opt a term and promote it, if the term makes it easier for consumers to self-identify as part of a group.

That eliminates the marketing effort to convince a consumer that they are part of a particular group. Getting individuals to self-identify themselves as members of various groups is a highly effective advertising delivery channel. Convincing you to use groupings as a convenient, time-saving shorthand (like branding is a convenient shortcut) gets you to buy more, more frequently.

Marketers and advertisers fear you insisting upon evaluating situations and people one-on-one, as they come up in your life, and using the marinating and revealing effects of time to judge value and character.

>Philosophers, novelists, sociologists, anthropologists, and economists used to define, study, and critique generational divides before advertising became such a pervasive part of the modern economy

And they still do...

> I do wonder about who draws the line for where a generation begins/ends

It's not really fixed as far as I can tell. Around the actual turn of the millennium, millennials were said to start in 1980. Now it's more commonly pegged at 1982.

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