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01.12.2004

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The Death Of Generational Marketing

The fact that generational marketing rarely takes advantage of the marketing opportunities posed by a unique cohort of consumers is reason enough to start lining up its pallbearers. But marketing strategies based on age or other artifacts that simply masquerade as generational markers is not my concern here. Instead, I wish to address a more fundamental problem with generational marketing that, even when done correctly, doesn't make sense. I'm talking about the practice of pitching to an entire generation as if it was a sensible target.

In practice, generational marketing often amounts to little more than an undisciplined hash of age and period-event driven marketing rather than a well-considered appeal to the unique tastes and sensibilities of a whole cohort. That is, when marketers talk about a generation of consumers they frequently speak of how consumers at a particular life-stage respond to key events. Strictly speaking, this is not generational marketing because neither life-stage nor the experience of events is unique to any one generation. Yet, even pure generational marketing is delusional if it assumes a generation will be homogeneous in outlook or behavior.

At the risk of some over-simplification, one could argue that popular notions of generations and generational marketing in particular coincided with the Baby Boom generation, which was itself derivative of academic research into the explosion in birthrates following WWII. In other words, the so-called Baby Boom generation does not constitute a generation in any meaningful marketing sense, but is simply shorthand for those born during a period of extraordinarily high fertility. While demographers and other social scientists were off trying to understand the behavior of the parents that spawned the Boomers, businesses and marketers readied themselves for the tidal wave of new consumers about to hit the beach. So, what started out as a rational attempt to capitalize on a sure thing (it wasn't difficult to predict that sales of diapers, for instance, were about to take off, followed by beanies, roller skates and, eventually, BMWs), quickly gave way to a growth industry of consumer trend spotters and "generational marketers."

Not content to stick with the Boomers, researchers naturally began to think about all the consumers they overlooked in their zeal to capture the post-war-baby-craze generation. Might not these other consumers form generations too? Unfortunately, without something as quantifiable as birthrates to go on, marketers and generation watchers haven't been able to agree on the stop and start dates for subsequent generations. As for the pre-Boomers, well, they're typically all lumped together and treated as one (Great) generation. More to the point, if there's something to generational marketing, then consumers born in 1964 should have more in common with consumers born in 1965 than with those born in 1946, yet we market to the first batch as Boomers and the second as Gen-Xers. All this is to say the custom of generational marketing usually relies less on actual consumption patterns than on wishful thinking.

Proponents of generational marketing claim, "Each generation's shared history gives it a sense of context from which it tends to view the world and which becomes enormously significant in understanding it." As tautological statements go, that is a good one, but the broader point is that something about a "generation's shared history" and not just its age helps explain why people of a given generation do what they do. The problem is that after the age of, say, ten there's precious little shared history to bind an entire generation, however defined, together. Some people are born into wealth and others into poverty. Some people are part of a racial minority and others not. Some people live their entire lives in one small town and others move from city to city. Some become Republicans and some throw bricks at Starbucks. Perhaps when men were giants you could treat everyone born during an arbitrary expanse of time as one, but those days are long gone now. Increases in geographical and social mobility, not to mention the dawning of the Information Age, have all contributed to an expansion in the range of experiences lived by individuals, and generational marketing can't hope to speak to these varied experiences with a single voice.

The irony is that the generation that kicked it all off, the Baby Boom Generation, is often characterized as the "Me Generation," a generation that has rejected mass marketing in favor of highly personalized products and services. Now, how personalized can any marketing be if it's targeting the largest consumer segment ever to walk the planet?

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