Misapplying Generational Marketing

I've become a bit concerned lately about the way in which generational marketing (Cam Marsten et. al.) is being misapplied.   It seems to me that, by so doing, the value that the theory proposes to offer is diminished or altogether discarded, and that many are still engaging in demographic stereotyping.

A quick refresher: generational marketing departed from age-based demographics by segmenting the population into specific generations (silent, boomers, generation X, and millennial - though that likely needs updating as the silent generation is dying off and the post-millennial generation will soon come of age) based roughly on the years in which people were born.   But more importantly, generational marketing considered the traits of these apparent age-groups according to the events that occur at certain points in their lifespan.

In particular, generational marketing suggest that people do not happen to behave a certain way because they are of a given age group, but that they behave a certain way because of their life experience during a given stage of our societal evolution - and more importantly, that the influences do not change as individuals age.   That is, a person's generation does not change simply because he gets older: members of Generation X do not change their culture and adopt the traits and characteristics of Boomers simply because they are over forty.

That is a significant difference, and the entire value of generational marketing: the realization that the person who is in his twenties today will retain many of his behaviors throughout the rest of his life.   He will not, upon turning forty years old, become just like the people who are that age today.   To assume so is to discard the lessons of generational marketing.

In times in which culture and society is stagnant, it is relatively safe to assume that a young man will become just like his father as he ages, because his life experience will be largely the same.   A forty-year-old cotton farmer in 1510 lived very much the same life as a forty-year-old cotton farmer in 1490.   But given the rate and degree at which our present society has changed, peoples' lives do not follow the same course as their predecessors: a forty-year-old accountant in 2010 works, acts, thinks, and behaves in a very different manner than a forty-year-old accountant did back in 1990.

Perhaps it's just clinging to traditional ways of doing business - the wistful notion that society has more stability and continuity than it presently does - that leads people to attempt to stuff the square peg of generational marketing into the round hole of age-based demographics and the stereotypes that proffer that people of a given physical age act in specific ways simply because of the number of years they have been alive, pointedly ignoring the life events they have experienced during the time at which they aged.

There may remain some characteristics that are in fact age related: the task of raising a child was done the same way in 1990 as it was in 2010 so the experience of "being a father" is largely similar.  While the trappings of the environment are likely to have made the tasks somewhat different, the basics are generally the same from one generation to the next.  I'd even go so far as to say that general concerns of a parent in rearing a child have not changed much over centuries or millennia in most cultures.

And I do believe that in a few decades the current era of rampant change will have run its course and society will fall back into a repetitive lull in which generational differences are minimized, and one generation is very much like the one before it.  But in the present era, it is simply not so - and to discard the bulk of theory around generational marketing to reduce it to age-based demographics is counterproductive.

Generational Selling

I've recently read Cam Marston's latest book, Generational Selling Tactics That Work, which deals with differences in the values, beliefs, and attitudes of the different generations that currently compose the adult population of the United States, examining how the differences in culture result in generation-specific buying behaviors, which in turn should lead those in sales and marketing to adjust their tactics to be more applicable to the unique characteristics of a given customer.

Naturally, generalizations such as this are less than perfect: it's foolish to assume that every person between the ages of 45 and 65 have the exact same mental model as one another - it's one of a multitude of factors that contribute to the psychology of a given individual - but similar life experiences have similar effects on those who are subject to them, and considering this from a perspective of age is not entirely a bad idea.

It is reasonable to conclude that everyone born at a certain time was deeply affected by the World War II, the shooting of John F. Kennedy, or the collapse of the Berlin Wall. It is reasonable to conclude that a generation that grew up with the Internet at their constant disposal is significantly different than another that had only newspapers. And it is reasonable to conclude that people who were a certain age at a certain time had many common experiences that had a significant and similar impact on their psychology, making them similar to one another and different to anyone who was not the same age at the same time.

All things considered, a person who was twenty years old in 1950 and a person who is twenty years old in the present day live in entirely separate cultures - it's no longer accurate to look to a younger person and assume "he's the same as I was when I was his age." So it ultimately makes sense to consider generational differences when marketing and selling goods - dealing with a customer of a different generation is as awkward and unfamiliar as dealing with a customer of a different country - and since the two live in the same nation and speak the same language, the differences are often overlooked.

There are certainly other factors to be considered, weighed, and matrixed against the notion of generational identity - but it is certainly a factor that merits consideration in the mix of many others, perhaps much more accurate, reasonable, and meaningful than many of the other factors that are used to segment the market (race, religion, ethnicity, income, etc.).