Marketers’ Fixation on the Millennial Generation | Hacker News Reader

Marketers’ Fixation on the Millennial Generation

nytimes.com

32 pointsapplecore42 comments

I may have missed the point of the article, but it seems like most consumer marketers have always been hyperfocused on (roughly) the 18-30 segment for various reasons. Some of those reasons would be flattering to people in that age range (more likely to be trendsetters, for example) and some would not be (more susceptible to marketing, or more likely to want to follow trends established by perceived trendsetters). But it seems like it's been this way my whole life.

Is the marketing focus on the Millenial Generation simply the fact that the age demographics that marketers have always been fixated on now roughly corresponds with the age range associated with Millenials? It seems that way to me, and if so the article may be conflating stereotypes about capital-G Generations with what consumer marketers have always done, which is to try to squeeze as much money as possible out of twentysomethings before they wise up to it.

Because that age group in the past 100ish years is the group that generally has the most disposable income, simple as that. However, that's probably not so true of the millennial's due to the poor economy for the past 7 years, high price of college education, and rather poor wages (and thus, less disposable income).

It's more than 18-30 year olds don't have fixed preferences yet. Most 18-30 year olds are discovering "their favorite" beer, brand of car, toothpaste, etc. Most 60 year olds, even though they have more disposable income, have more established brand preference. Hence, it makes more sense to market to the younger people, even if the older people actually spend more. The genius thing is to have a ladder of products and bring people in at the bottom -- say, a cheap Yaris or Echo to start, and then they move "naturally" upmarket as those cars themselves move upmarket (remember when the Corolla was a low end car? Now there are several models below it, if you include Scion, for new buyers). People also tend to move upmarket within the same brand, say up to a Camry, Avalon, Highlander, or even a Lexus.

(Obviously this varies by product/market, but generally for most consumer purchases it is valid.)

I'm a baby boomer, and a few years ago had to buy a new car. I was shopping for one of those entry level cars, and the marketing was millennial-oriented to the point of being comical. I literally ordered the cheapest model in the line, with zero options. As I signed the check, I asked the salesman: So, the marketing for these cars is all hip hop and millennial, but who is actually buying these things?

His answer: "Middle aged cheapskates like you."

This is a real problem for Toyota. They created the entire Scion brand to attract young people because the average age of a Toyota owner is getting pretty high. And what's happened? A lot of the Scions are being bought by cheapskate "oldsters" (like me) who know it's made by Toyota and want the low end. (Alas, I didn't buy a Scion this time around but I sure looked at them a lot.)

Amusingly, a Scion is what I got. The year that I bought it, Toyota was selling the Yaris in Canada but not in the US. From what I could tell, the Corolla, Yaris, and Scion, were all cut from the same cloth. I did look at other makes too, but the Scion was priced to move.

A minor selling point was that Scion's options were all dealer-installed, meaning I could have a stripped down model without waiting for one, or having to haggle. I think that I may have bought the cheapest new car on the market at the time.

My only gripe is that it's noisy when driving at highway speeds, something that I don't do very often.

The only message I ever really got from Scion marketing is "CHEAP."

I don't know what are you are, but when I was 18-26 that message was very appealing to me!

Scion FR-S / Subaru BRZ should be exempted from all of this, of course (Similar to the Corvette vs. all Chevys, or the Viper and Dodge). If I were in the market for a petrol car right now, those would be on the shortlist. I'd pay a slight premium for the Subaru due to brand identity, but they're the same car.

I love "Badge Engineering".

Means if you're in the market for a reliable used car, you can buy a Pontiac Vibe for cheap and get a Toyota Matrix in quality. (since it's the same car)

I'd be ok paying a $500 premium for Subaru > Scion. If it were a situation like the "Saabaru", I'd happily take the $5k savings for the cheaper one. I bought a Lincoln LS loaded for $21500 when they were discontinuing it in UAE, and got basically an S-Type ($50k or so in UAE at the time).

Brands have some value. Especially if it influences where you get your post-sale support. It's just not an infinite value.

I'm in the upmarket track with Trek bikes right now. I bought my first entry bike for $450. So far I've gotten several thousand miles out of it and it's gone so well that I'll probably just stick with them for the rest of my life.

Or just never buy new, bikes or cars. Never have, probably never will.

Um, how is this news?

18-35 year olds have more marketeer-accessible expendable income (ie, most don't have mortgages, large family expenditures and haven't racked up medical bills), most are financially naive (made deliberately so by perverse educational systems) and most are socially aspirational. This isn't unique to millennials though.

Can you elaborate on how does the educational system influences personal finances, and what do you mean by that?

There is almost zero information provided on proper personal financial responsibility/management in formal education in the U.S. You'd get more information from the /r/personalfinance Reddit subreddit FAQ.

This isn't exclusive to US.

I remember having a class called "household" taking about an hour a week for a year or two in my primary education, where we learned mostly about cooking. Yes, I'm not joking. A class about finance could take the same amount of time, since apparently there is time available in the school schedule, and be very worthwhile.

Ironically, in the US that class was called "Home Economics"

We had a semester-long required course in high school (usually taken as a freshman) called "Career and Family" which focused on a re-hash of sex ed. and information on the dangers of drug abuse. We also had a semester-long required course in economics which focused more on the stock market and macroeconomics.

Way back in 4th/5th grade we had an hour or so each day for a couple of weeks focused on things like balancing a checkbook, but it was probably a bit too early on to do much good beyond reinforcing the required math skills. Then again, cooking was something I learned a year or two earlier in a summer-school class, so maybe some things do stick at that age.

There's a difference between a lack of financial education and "made deliberately so by perverse educational systems."

I don't think there's a massive conspiracy to systematically keep people financially naive. I think there's a legitimate debate to be had over whether formal schooling is the best place to put this sort of education.

How is that debatable? We teach coins and bills to 8 yr olds, but for some pseudoiberal-arts-intellectual reason we don't teach propaganda and compounding interest to hif schoolers. (I actually learned propaganda in a school-funded after school academic "sports" club, but my case was rare)

I don't think we should be teaching finance any more than we should be teaching cooking. It's mainly a life survival skill, not an academic subject, and thus should be the responsibility of parents.

We do teach cooking in schools. At least in Europe. See my parent post, that class was mandatory.

There are plenty of classes that teach non-academic subjects, finance should be one of them, since we life in an money centered society.

> We do teach cooking in schools. At least in Europe. See my parent post, that class was mandatory.

I know we do. We shouldn't. "Home economics" is the biggest waste of time I had to endure in my entire education.

I'm not so sure.

Schools, by design, are not interested in encouraging critical thinking or creating independent and free individuals. Rather, the focus is on organising children and creating reliable, predictable, obedient citizens. As award-winning former teacher John Gatto puts it, “school was looked upon from the first part of the 20th Century as a branch of industry and a tool of governance.”

The financial elite and their philanthropic organisations together with lobby groups and governments have been able to mold society by funding and pushing compulsory state schooling for the masses.

Also, schools have become bastions of various ideologues (feminists, multiculturalists, moral relativists etc.), most of whom are not particularly clear thinkers. These people spend most of their time divided between pushing their own brand of BS and fighting for tenure with little concern for true educational reform.

"The Ad Contrarian" blog talks about this a lot. Marketers are apparently obsessed with millennials, but their parents (and older) are the ones with the money who really buy things. For example, the people targeted by car ads constitute 12% of the market, the rest is people older than them. http://adcontrarian.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-youth-car-delus...

Sure, but the idea is the 18-34 set is developing brand loyalties, so when they actually do have money the marketing will pay off.

Cars are a good example. I'm pushing 50, and when I go to buy another car I'll probably buy a Toyota, because I've had good luck with that brand. The other carmakers can spent a trillion dollars on marketing and it's not going to influence me in the slightest. But people who don't have any experience with cars beyond dad's hand-me-down jalopy are going to be more receptive.

This point of view, written by someone over 50, ignores the fact that many baby-boomers still want to see themselves the same way they did in their 20s and 30s, making the advertising nearly as effective on them. At the very least, the data is not showing that they are being driven away by the advertising, and it is not showing that anyone is more effective with baby-boomers by specifically targeting them with campaigns that would not be effective with millennials.

Wait, since when is 1980 in the Millennial generation? 20 years seems really rather broad to be dividing into generations. What does a 35 year old have in common with a 15 year old?

That makes me a Millennial and my wife from 1979 a Gen Xer. Oh, she's not going to like that one bit :P

And what ever happened to Gen X? They just seem to get universally lumped into the Baby Boomers now, if they get mentioned at all.

Through most of my life I've been distinctly aware that I was lumped into Gen X (born 1978) with some of my aunts and uncles, while my sister (1980) and, more recently, my wife (1981) were usually lumped into some other generation (the name of which has shifted every few years).

I think what's really going on is that most of the advertisers ignored Gen X as a waste of marketing resources when Baby Boomers were always the pot of gold. Most of them are now looking back and realizing that they missed an opportunity at that crucial age range, and they're trying to make up for it by continuing to ignore Gen X and going straight for the Millennials. Of course, that's not to say that Gen X was completely ignored or that marketing doesn't work on them. There are clearly any number of instances in which they were targeted with some effect. However, I think that, in general, we live in a world which is still largely skewed in favor of the Baby Boomers, despite the fact that most of them are shifting into fixed incomes and/or continuing to work full-time well into retirement age simply because they do not feel they can retire (sometimes because they're still supporting their Gen X or Millennial children).

It's even broader than that. Different sources and countries use different ranges, so where you fall depends on which you consult (some use 1976 as a starting year, others use 1978, and still others use 1980 or 1981.) Some also carve out additional generations (MTV generation / Doom Generation / XY Cusp Generation along with Echo Boomers / Generation McGuire) for people born in the edge years. Here's more:

http://www.esds1.pt/site/images/stories/isacosta/secondary_p...

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2008/04/fin...

The old Wikipedia article on XY Cusp before it got edited: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JCDenton2052/mh5

Excerpt: "The XY Cusp includes those people born in the mid-to-late 1970s and early 1980s. The word XY is used because their generational identity is mixed, uncertain, or deviant from X or Y or both, but do not constitute a separate generational group in themselves. Some place the years between: 1976-1983 [3] [4][5] [6] People born within this group are in parallel situations with people born in between previous generations: Generation Jones between Boomer and X - late 50s, early 60s, (teens of the 70s); between Silents and Boomers - late 30s, early 40s (teens of the 50s); and the Beat generation between G.I. and Silents - late 10s, early 20s (teens of the 30s). They are referred to as Cusper Groups, Transitional Times, or Buffer Zones. John Losey states "If you couldn't neatly place yourself in any of the [generations], then you're probably a Cusper. 1943-1947, 1962-1967 and 1976-1983 are each considered transition times. Many people born during these cusp periods identify with the generations on either side."

There's definitely no single standard in sociology on this.

Baby boomers are on 55+ now.

Gen X is middle age now, and they eventually got low paying jobs working for the baby boomers.

Gen Y happened, but we were boring, so we got retroactively split up and rolled into Gen X and Millenials.

So... Ad researchers have rebranded Gen Y?? That's kind of funny.

(Also shows how much attention I was paying. I thought there were Boomers, X's, Y's, and Millenials)

It all seems a bit wishy-washy to me. I was born in 1985 I turned 30 this year. I have enough trouble identifying with my sister (who is six years younger than me) let alone someone I have 15 years on.

FYI original definition of millenial is +18 years old in yr 2000 (so BOD 1982)

I too protest about our marginalization. We are Gen X.5

24/7 micropandering

An alarmingly accurate characterization.

I, for one, am just fine with marketers ignoring me.

But are you really ignored?

Quickly take a look around your office/home and take a look at the open tabs in your browser and count the ads and the brands.

What ads?

Though millennials are hailed as the first generation of “digital natives,” the over-40 (and 50 and 60) sets have become pretty adept when it comes to smartphones and other devices.

I always find this condescending if not outright insulting. Did the flipping internet, smartphones and all the rest of it just spring fully formed into existence with the birth of the first millennial?

We didn't become adept, we invented it! /rant off

Don't worry.

It won't be long before the marketers focus on us -- the marketers for arthritis, incontinence, gout, and erectile dysfunction medication that is.

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