One of the more notable differences between Millennials and other generations are their equivocal feelings about work. While they (and their parents) are anxious to get a good job and begin establishing their adult lives as functioning members of the modern economy, they are also vaguely uneasy about the place of work in their lives. They expect they will need to make serious compromises to land and keep a job.
We identified some of these anxieties in focus groups last spring among young professionals at major companies. Last week, Ad Age featured our findings in an article, “The Inside Scoop on What Spurs Millennial Hires” (9.22.08) Nealy everyone we talked with was concerned with two issues: ‘work-life balance’ and ‘making a difference’. These two concerns were sometimes related, particularly if their job was not seen as offering much opportunity to ‘give back’.
No doubt the recent financial shocks are causing Millennials to give even greater thought – and worry – to what the work world will mean for their lives. Shrinking job markets make for fewer chances to ask for concessions on vacation time, education perks, and other incentives dear to the hearts of Millennials. This week, in her GenNext blog, Sarah Ewing frankly discusses the tradeoffs she considered in taking a more ‘strategic’ job with fewer perks. Alex Kniess’s posting is titled, “Your Career Should Be Part of Your Life (Not the Other Way Around)”. And in his GenNext blog entry this week, Michael Girts, a new AAE at Leo Burnett in Chicago, posted a wonderful video, “”Music and Life” that neatly encapsulates Gen Y’s fears about the potential lack of fulfillment they face by continuing to chase workplace succcess. The 1-minute video (you’ll be glad you watched it) pairs an Alan Watts voiceover with adorable animation to capture the angst many young workers feel about the school – career — success trajectory. “Then when you wake up one day when you are about 40 years old and you say ‘My God! I’m here, I’ve arrived. I’m there’. But you don’t feel any different than you’ve always felt… you’ve missed the point.” Are you sensing a theme here?
In our research, this translated into a desire to tell their bosses, “This job is not my life” or ““This job is not my life!” Or as another put it, “My job isn’t life or death – I’m not saving lives, I work in marketing – sometimes people forget that.”
I’m not exactly sure how this insight to the psyche of Millennials relates to marketing, but I think it’s important; they are unsure whether to be motivated by the same incentives as the rest of us — or at least up until this latest economic crisis.
Call it the Juno effect, the Jolie effect or the Jamie Lynn Spears effect. Whatever you call it, it’s ‘in’ to be a mom. The average number of births per woman reached the magical 2.1 population replacement rate in 2006 for the first time since 1971. The trend continued in 2007. According to newly released U.S. Census Bureau data, more babies were born in 2007 than even during the height of the baby boom – 4.32 million babies in 2007, more than the 4.30 million babies born in 1957.
There’s no question that being pregnant and having a baby looks cooler than ever. First there’s the celebrities reproducing faster than one can read about it in the supermarket tabloids. Then there’s the movies and TV shows. Ellen Page as Juno was spunky, hip and totally emulatable by teens in Gloucester, MA — and who knows where else? An NBC Reality Show, The Baby Borrowers, is reportedly intended to reveal the sleepless reality of parenthood, but would it be interesting at all if there were no interest in the topic? Knocked Up was a hit romantic comedy.
So who is driving the trend? Is it the Millennial teens and young adults or Gen X’ers who delayed having babies to establish careers? The 2007 numbers of births by age of mother are hard to find. But there are indications that it is the younger women driving the trend. The percent of births to women 15-29 has remained steady at 62% from 2001-2005, and there is no reason to believe that proportion has changed in favor of older mothers. Further, according to a Dec 2007 CDC report, the birth rate for the youngest teens (aged 10-14) declined, and the birth rate for older teens aged 18-19 (73 per 1000) is more than three times higher than the rate for teens aged 15-17 (22 per 1,000). The biggest jump was among unmarried women aged 25-29, among whom there was a 10 percent increase between 2005 and 2006.
The current baby-mania may have its roots in Millennial attitudes. Many no longer feel constrained by a timetable that calls for establishing a career, then a family. Millennials believe they can do what they want, and if a baby is what they want right now, why not go for it? As the products of one of the most successful generations of parents, they have good parenting role models. And as one of the wealthiest cohorts, they may feel they are financial as well as psychologically prepared. Who knows, they may be right? A plethora of babies may be just the latest clue that Millennials are not like Gen X’ers.
Barbara Bylenga is President Outlaw Consulting, a highly successful San Francisco-based company specializing in spotting trends. They talk to trendsetters and predict which trends will go mainstream. Outlaw has been telling companies like Nike, Levi’s and Diageo for years what the coolest of the cool kids want. In a recent exclusive interview for the Global Business Network(GBN), she affirmed that cool Millennials are indeed different from cool kids of the past. Here are a few highlights:
GBN: The bulk of your trendsetters are in their teens and 20′s. We hear a lot about the Millennial Generation and how they are different. Is it hype or real?
BYLENGA: Millennials, or Gen Ys, are definitely different. They seem to feel more empowered – and more entitled– than any generation before them. They have an innate team orientation that makes them excellent collaborators. And the ideas about issues like marriage and career are radically different. Their “American dream” isn’t about the picket fence; it’s a flexible freelance career and a life defined by passion. There’s no doubt in my mind that they are poised to change society. And they’re the biggest American generation ever — even bigger than their parents, the Baby Boomers. In just a couple years, they’ll be on-third of the U.S. population.
GBN: What are Gen Ys like as consumers?
BYLENGA: Gen Ys see themselves as change-makers. But they’re also busy trying to have a middle-class life, so their protests take different form than youth protests of the past. They see corporation’s as having lots of power but little heart, and they try to create change by using their dollars. The “aha” for corporations is to recognize that values and authenticity are important to this generation — and that directly affects how they spend. American Apparel, for example, has been totally embraced by youth because of its labor practices. Shopping there make them feel like they’re spending money in the right place. Companies that really “walk their talk” about cor values will be endeared. If you want to be relevant to Gen Ys, you need to understand their mindset. Understand what they’re doing — and why.
GBN: What’s the hot new thing among Gen Y trendsetters? I assume they all have iPhones...
BYLENGA: Well, iPhones are still very popular, but they’re not as cool as the MacBook Pro, which is the most powerful status symbol among our trendsetters right now. Some of them are living in squalor on 24th and Mission, eating Ramen noodles and shopping at the Goodwill – but they paid two grand for their MacBook Pro. An iPhone is nice for keeping in touch, but let’s face it, it’s yuppie accessory. Toms Shoes are also big right now. Every time we do a focus group wtih trendsetters, at least one of them shows up wearing a new pair of Toms. They’re simply designed and very comfortable, and for every pair you purchase Toms donates one pair to a child in need in Argentina or South Africa. “one for one,” they say on the box. It’s a simple mission and the shoes are hip.
I highly recommend Millennial Makeover by Winograd and Hais (Rutgers Press, 2008). While the focus is political, there is plenty of useful data for marketers, much of it from familiar sources like Pew (see previous blog post). My reason for recommending it, however, is their use of the data to address the question, ‘Are Millennials just younger versions of previous generations or are they really different’? The arguments they put forth are compelling.
According to the authors
“… media moguls, authors and even politicians make the fundamental error of thinking that today’s young people think and act just like they did when they were young. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
They ask us to think of Millennials as a generational cohort made up solely of Harry Potter and his plucky friends, and to contrast them with the adults at Hogwarts, the scowling, often clueless faculty and ministry of magic administrators. While Harry and his team (key word) work hard to save the world, applying special ingenuity and talents, the grown ups they must contend with are “individualistic, judgmental egotists who talk more than they act.”
Millennial professionals who participated in two online focus groups, to our surprise, expressed a similar view of Boomers. When asked who they prefer to work with, all said they preferred to work with other Millennials (no surprise there), and they MUCH prefer to work for Gen X’ers over Boomers. This was indeed a big surprise to us, after all that has been written about the supposed natural affinity between Millennials and Boomers. Boomers are considered to be like their parents, pretty old fashioned and out of touch. One young brand manager at Unilever even shared with us that there is a ‘reverse mentoring’ program in place at his company, where Millennials share their technology wizardry insights with older, less adept Boomers. In contrast, they feel as if they have more to learn from Gen X’ers and that X’ers are more willing to take the time to teach them what they need to know.
Winograd and Hais would find this no surprise, contending that indeed X’ers and M’ers have more in common with each other than they do with the ‘idealist’ Boomers who bear responsibility for years of political gridlock and ultimately pointless culture wars.
Is ‘Multicultural Youth Marketing’ a redundancy? 38% of 18-24 year olds are non-white (see chart below).
This generation is famous for its tolerance — Pew Research reports 94% of the post 1977 born Gen Y approve of interracial dating compared to 84% of Boomers.
Just 17% of 18-29 year olds said that race was important to their vote in the primary compared to 22% of 30-44 year olds.
57% voted for Obama vs 48% for all age groups. (Pew Research Center, Young Voters in the 2008 Primaries).
Given this kind of evidence, I think there is a case that youth marketing and multicultural marketing are one in the same. Gen M not only desires diversity, they expect it. Recent focus groups we conducted on women and fashion found the appeal of celebrities like Tyra Banks easily cross ethnic boundaries, while Jennifer Anniston is ‘every girl’ for everyone. No college can afford to not have its multicultural images on display. Perhaps we are stating the obvious, but if so, why are we still talking about ‘multicultural marketing’? Perhaps we should just say ‘culture aware marketing’?
Although it happened last November, thanks to disgruntled Gen X’ers, the story of Kevin Colvin and the story of how he was Busted by Facebook is still making the the rounds on the Internet. In case you missed it, Kevin, a senior at Holy Cross in Massachusetts, wrote a polite email saying he would be gone a few days from his internship at Anglo Bank in Boston. A little investigation by his boss revealed his true location, a Halloween party in Worcester. He was busted when his boss wrote to inquire if everything was okay at home, adding as an afterthought, ‘(cool wand)’.
An instructive story on the dangers of the illusion of privacy in the Internet era, certainly. But Kevin is far from the first person to make this mistake. (In fact, I was also fired from a bank summer job at 17 for calling in sick on my birthday, a good early life lesson.) So why has this become a prime example in the indictment of the Millennial mindset? Something in this story has touched a nerve with Generation X. Here is an example from Radaronline, posted May 15.
My lack of empathy for Kevin comes from my sense of loyalty to the generation born between the years of 1961 and 1981. Generation X. Kevin is part of the generation born between 1982 and 2002—a Millennial, formerly known as Generation Y. (They got renamed after whining too much.) They’re younger. They’re healthier. They got to do anal in high school. They think updating a spreadsheet while simultaneously posting to a Twitter account about the latest gossip on perezhilton.com is an essential corporate skill. And, like Kevin, they’re always doing stupid shit, but rarely getting called on it. What’s more, Millennials pose a vital threat to my generation’s cultural legitimacy, not to mention our position in the workplace.
Intergenerational conflict is nothing new, but it will be interesting to see if this squabbling over the positive or negative character of an entire generation will affect brands. Will Gen X’ers unite to distance themselves from the music, entertainments, products and services enjoyed by its younger cohort? Will Millennials even notice the slurs, or will they decide to fight back, and which brands will help them do it?
