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Comment by catigula | Hacker News Reader

>"Monster Green shoppers are likely younger (Gen-Z/Millennial/Gen-X) male, lower income & Caucasian (skews Hispanic)."

What does this sentence even mean?

Companies like Monster and Redbull are marketing companies that happen to sell energy drinks.

That is almost certainly not a meaningless demographic they pulled out of thin air. It might not be meaningful to you as a demographic. It might even be offensive to you as a demographic.

But, to the marketing company, that is a concrete “group of humans” that respond well to their product and advertising. It informs how they develop their ads, how they target them, which geographic markets they push hard in, what events they sponsor, etc.

When they define that demographic as the people they’re targeting, and allocate their capital towards targeting them, they see the highest returns they’ve been able to find so far.

The world is so much more beautiful when you don't know how that works.

I think there is a certain beauty in it. Making an effort to understand how the universe/world/society you were born into actually works, not how you’d like it to work, is kinda key to finding your ikigai I think.

I feel like the more I learn about the world the better I am at living in it but the less enjoyable it becomes.

Which part don't you understand?

The part where Gen-X is younger, maybe?

It's perplexing, to put it generously, but it doesn't throw the semantics of the entire sentence into question.

For all we know the document is from two decades ago.

Two decades ago makes the GenZ reference confusing, as the very oldest of them by the most generous definition would be only 9 years old.

With a span across 50 years, that range from Gen X to Gen Z is just awkward to place as "young buyers of Monster" at any point in time.

(Gen-Z/Millennial/Gen-X)

This covers like sixty years?

Closer to 30 years I'd say. Probably a lot of working age men, especially construction.

Generation X is pinned starting in the mid-60s. The Millenials follow, with Gen Z capping the range off in the early 2010s. It's about 50-60 years.

Well, their target could be read as "15 to 45 yo", which starts at the youngest GenX and extends to the younger GenZ.

It means a marketer will know where to deploy capital.

Which part? younger men with lower income who are likely to be Hispanic Caucasian (as opposed to non Caucasian Hispanic)

It means some people still think there are meaningful racial categories, that people with light skin come from the Caucasus, that speaking Spanish is an "ethnicity" which is orthogonal to "race".

Also Gen X (aged between 44 and 60 at time of writing) are "young".

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