The Most Diverse Generation in History

Marketing to Millenials is tricky. They are, as AJ Agrawal writes at Forbes, “the most diverse generation to have ever existed.”

Born between 1982 and 2002, the youngest are only 13 years old, but the oldest are already 34. Those on the tail end of the cohort are still basically children, but half are old enough to be college grads. Many have founded their own companies.

“You’ll find millennials consisting of everyone from single mothers to middle class professionals,” Agrawal writes. “You’ll find them in every single social class and industry from apps to fashion trends and marketing.”

That was true of previous generations too, of course, but it’s much more true of Millenials.

They’re even more unique in other ways. GenXers and Boomers remember the days before iTunes and Spotify when nearly everyone listened to the same music on the same handful of radio stations. They remember when everyone watched the same programs on television because nobody had more than a couple of channels.

They remember when everybody got their news from the same local newspaper and the same two or three local television networks. Back then, Americans of all ages and ethnic groups and political orientations shared the same cultural reference points. Tastes diverged, but not nearly as much as they do now.

The days of mass production, mass media, mass communication, and mass marketing are over forever. Never before has market segmentation and even individualization been more crucial, but some businesses are still stuck in the past.

“Many brands,” Patrick Spenner writes, “continue to push traditional life markers such as getting married, buying a home and starting a family, because that’s what drove older generations’ purchasing habits.”

Katie Elfering, a consumer strategist at CEB Iconoculture, digs deeper.

Millennials grew up in an expanding world of choice and options for just about everything they ever needed or wanted. Because of this, they view life very differently. They don’t see just see one path available to them—they see limitless possibilities to make their life their own. And as a result, they are misjudged and misunderstood—called narcissists or assumed to be in a state of perpetual stunted adulthood. In reality, it’s because a lot of these aspects of adulthood aren’t as available as they were in the past and, more importantly, because they know they have a lot of alternative options for what adulthood looks like… Brands need to stop waiting for Millennials to “grow up” and fall in line with what past generations have done.

Indeed. Millenials aren’t going to start behaving—or shopping—like Baby Boomers for the same reason America can’t go back to the 1950s—or even the early 2000s. History has no rewind button.

Boomers lived their young adult lives the way they did because they were the products of a stable post-war America with mass production, mass communication and mass everything else. We all live in a hyperindividualized world now, but Millenials have never known anything else. They’re going to be around longer than the rest of us, too. Advertisers and marketers, like all other professionals, had better get used to it.