Generations Are Not Marketing Segments

For decades, large companies have been advertising and marketing to their customers based on age group. “Young people” were perceived, or at least treated, as a monolith, as were senior citizens. Chief marketing officers obsessed over how to market to Millennials—as if 83 million Americans were more or less interchangeable and mostly wanted the same things.

None of this makes any sense any more, especially not in the era of targeted ads. Even the smallest businesses can take advantage of microtargeting. A self-published author of a science-fiction trilogy can advertise books to Star Wars and Star Trek fans, for example, regardless of the fans’ age, gender, or location. A vegan restaurant in Minneapolis, a boutique coffeeshop in Seattle, and a microbrewery in Portland can likewise microtarget its potential customer base.

The world is more culturally diverse than ever, with myriad “tribes” of athletes, hipsters, vegans, the religiously devout, bookworms, audiophiles, nature lovers, car guys, gym rats, running enthusiasts, wine connoisseurs—you name it. A single city block can include one of each type of person. Each member of each “tribe” has something meaningfully (not just commercially) in common with other members of their tribe on the other side of the world—including those who are decades older and of the opposite gender—that they don’t have in common with the person living next door.

Marketing to microsegments wasn’t possible decades ago and was only faintly possible until recently until the Internet simultaneously fragmented and (in different ways) brought people together.

So unless you’re selling school supplies or condos in retirement communities, forget marketing to strictly to age groups like Generation Z or Baby Boomers. Forget marketing to Millennials. What a Millennial, anyway? Someone who graduated from high school between the year 2000 and now. Sure, these folks have some things in common with each other that they don’t have with older and younger generations—bonds forged by shared experiences at a certain age during a certain moment in history—but a young twenty-something finance professional in Manhattan has little else in common with someone the same age born and raised by farmers in North Dakota.

Splitting your marketing segments into tribes is about more than just microtargeting your social media ads. Netflix, for instance, curates content for what it calls “taste communities.” And Netflix has identified more than a thousand of them. Obviously, with such a large number, the company is dividing its audience into more granular segments than those who like comedies versus those who like crime dramas. Netflix can actually determine if you’re the type of viewer who would enjoy American Horror Story with the latest Adam Sandler comedy as a chaser.

Businesses need to spend a lot more time thinking about how to market to people who like the same things and have a similar mindset. Easier said than done, of course, but you don’t want your business to be the last one on the bandwagon.