The Next Big Thing demographically is the echo boom, children of the baby boomers, and they are driving consumer product companies to distraction. They’re hard to reach, and harder to persuade once you’ve caught their attention, yet crucial to the futures of most consumer companies. This is happening because of the interplay of three primary factors: the 20-somethings are psychologically different from earlier generations; the social environment around us is shifting; and the marketing tools available today are evolving with astonishing speed. The combination of these factors is driving traditional marketers nuts – and simultaneously opening enormous opportunties for those that can successfully adapt.
Not all 20-somethings are echo boomers, but the echo boom is the critical generation for tomorrow’s marketers because of their size, sophistication, and clout. The echo boomers are slightly smaller than the baby boom in absolute numbers, but they represent the future for any consumer company that hopes to be in business 10 years from now. That makes hunting this elusive generation more than sport; it’s survival.
Because the boomers delayed having children, the echoes are more demographically dispersed than their parents, but they are, roughly speaking, currently between the ages of 8 and 28. Accordingly, the leading third of the echoes are either in, or are about to enter the labour force. As such, they are the ones driving household formation, and all the consumer expenditure that entails: durables, cars, tableware, food, and so on.
So what makes this generation so elusive? Let’s start with the echoes themselves, and explore how and why they differ from earlier generations.
The mind of the echo boomer
The echo boomers are not just younger versions of the baby boomers. They think, behave, and interact differently than older generations. But to put this in proper context, let’s look back several hundred years.
Before the Industrial Revolution, and the vast majority of people worked on a farm, life expectancy was roughly 42 years, although there were many people older than that. If a farmer could expect to work hard, and then die at age 42, on average, then childhood lasted until puberty, just short of age 14. After puberty, young people were widely expected to do the work of an adult, and would often marry shortly thereafter, and begin families of their own. When the “young adult” turned 28, their parents were reaching the age of 42 – about time to die off and leave the farm to their children. So at 28, people became not just adults, but “senior citizens” – the “old folks” other people looked up to.
This is, of course, a very broad and rough generalization, but if you look at that average pre-Industrial lifecycle, you see some significant differences from the present day. First, there were no “teenagers.” That stage of life is a relatively recent invention. Next, the stages of life divided roughly into thirds: child, working adult, senior. If you now substitute today’s life expectancy, or better yet tomorrow’s, of somewhere between 81 and 90, then childhood stretches to between 27 and 30; working adulthood extends between 54 and 60; and seniority fills the rest. Of course, our working lives have stretched because we have mentally pegged the retirement goalposts at 65, with individual variations. (That goalpost is changing as well, but that’s another subject for another day.)
The key here is that childhood now stretches into the late 20s, and, indeed, some commentators have remarked that people approaching 30 often seem to behave as if they were 10 years younger. This prolonged childhood is the first, marked difference in the psychology of the echo boomers.
Next, the echoes have had a very different experience of families and relationships than their boomer parents. The boomers grew up in the Ozzie and Harriet era of the nuclear family with mom and dad filling what we think of as traditional roles. But the echoes have grown up as the nuclear family has been disintegrating. Dr. Robert Glossop of the Vanier Institute of the Family remarks that today’s children live in what he terms a “divorce culture.” Even if a child’s parents are not divorced, because of what’s happening with her friends’ families, she expects her parents will divorce sooner or later.
More children than ever before live in split families, single parent families, and re-constituted families, often with unmarried parents, all of which are statistically less stable environments for children. And even when a child grows up in a household with two married parents, odds are that both parents are working and out of the home. The net result is that the echoes have had more independence thrust upon them, and at a more immature age, than any previous generation. In consequence, (and again I’m making broad generalizations here), they are less mature, less secure, and more alienated from society, and more concerned about their own selfish interests.
I’m not saying that earlier generations are models of enlightened self-interest. Indeed, their baby boom parents were the previous champions of “me first!” behaviour. But what I’m trying to point is a change in emphasis. Earlier generations were selfish despite the teachings of their elders. This generation is selfish because they’ve never been taught differently. It makes for a different mindset.
More media, less reach
The echoes are also the first Internet generation. They’ve known and used computers all their lives, and many of them can’t remember not having access to the Internet. And, just as television made the boomers the first generation to think in terms of McLuhan’s Global Village, the echoes are the first generation to think in terms of being able to interact with people and events all over the world. This gives them a much broader, activist outlook than earlier generations.
And they are more independent of older generations. Margaret Mead, the famous anthropologist, once commented that in societies that are experiencing rapid technological change, parents have little to offer their children in the way of advice since their knowledge is no longer relevant. Emphasizing this point,The Economist magazine, in an article called “Know future” (published 21 December 2000), quotes Yvonne Fritzsche, a researcher at Frankfurt’s Psydata market-research institute as saying “Technology is one of the reasons that the relationship between the young and old is becoming a dialogue, rather than a lesson. … You can’t rebel against helplessness.”
In turn, the echoes have more access to more different kinds of media than any earlier generation. This makes it very difficult for marketers to find any mass media that reaches a significant portion of their target market among the echoes. The time the echoes spend surfing the Internet, online chatting, and playing video games is largely drawn from what would otherwise have been their TV watching time. And the new media don’t generally offer the same kind of advertising access that a successful TV program did a generation ago. Moreover, when echoes do watch television shows, they’re more likely to do so either from a pre-recorded DVD collection or through a personal video recorder like TiVo, and so can skip or clip the commercials. As The Wall Street Journal noted in “As Younger Viewers Drift Away, Networks Go Looking for Them,” (21 Nov. 2003): “Many of the young-adult viewers most coveted by advertisers have been spurning live TV. … Their prime-time TV viewing has been falling for the past decade, typically a percentage point or two each year. This fall, the erosion appears to be accelerating, with men age 18 to 34 watching seven percentage points less prime-time TV than they did a year ago”.
The echoes are also more sceptical about advertising. According to a 2003 Yankelovich poll, 77% of young people between the ages of 9 and 17 research a significant purchase online before they buy. And an article on the International Flavors and Fragrences website titled “Marketing to Young Adults” notes that “Because [young people] are savvy to advertising tactics, [marketers] cannot be too general. Instead, young adults appreciate honesty. Be sincere and to the point when delivering your message.” This is especially true as Gartner research says that the echoes return a significantly higher percentage of purchases than older generations.
Furthermore, since the echoes indulge in a global range of fashions and influences, they tend to pick up and drop products with breath-taking speed, as highlighted in “Youth, Inc.” in the 21 December 2000 issue of The Economist: “When urban teens got bored with Tommy Hilfiger’s clothes in mid-1999, the firm’s share price plummeted by 85% in a matter of months. A year ago [in 1999], push scooters were a 1950s anachronism; now, thanks to an overnight youth craze for an updated model called the Razor, they are the best-selling toy in America, making more money for the obscure Taiwanese company that manufactures them than Mattel makes from its Barbie doll.” Echoes can make or break companies overnight, and they change their minds in unpredictable ways, rather like a school of fish changing direction.
The adult echoes’ employment and living situation
Next, let’s consider where the echoes are today. The “adult” echo in his 20s is much more likely than earlier generations to be living with his parent or parents. Whereas the boomers considered a grown-up who lived with his mother (for instance) to be a loser, it’s far more acceptable for the echoes in part because so many of them do it. It also allows the echoes to minimize their living costs, and spend money in more enjoyable ways than on rent.
Moreover, the work environment is far more hostile for the echoes than it was for the young boomers, so money can be harder to come by. Many of the echoes find themselves trapped in a Catch-22: they need experience to get a job, but they need a job to get experience. And the emergence of the global economy has established a global labour force, so that echoes are competing with workers around the world as well as with rising domestic automation. Finally, they’ve watched how employers have treated their parents, and don’t believe in giving loyalty to an employer, since they don’t expect to receive loyalty from one. As a result, their attitudes are more that work is a means to a lifestyle, not the centrepiece of their lives. Meredith Bagby, author of Rational Exuberance: The Influence of Generation X on the New American Economy, wrote that “The overwhelming majority of graduates [today] see their career at graduation not as a straight line of advancement in one company but as a zigzag path from company to company, job to job, skill to skill.”
So as a group, the echoes are a moving target, considerably harder for a marketer to hit than earlier generations. They have different values, they’re harder to reach, harder to persuade, and harder to please, and have a more fluid, less predictable lifestyle. They’re a tough, tough sell. And, perversely, the tools marketers have available are compounding these problems by becoming more powerful.
New tools for marketing
When there were only two or three television channels, and one or two newspapers, it was easy to broadcast your message and make sure you got exposure to everyone you wanted to reach. As the proliferation of channels and media has exploded, the ability to pick one medium as a means of reaching most of your audience is evaporating like water on a hot griddle.
Narrowcasting was a means of supplementing the scattershot reach of broadcasting with a carefully targeted messaged tailored to reach focused, specific markets, like hunting with a rifle instead of a shotgun. You could justify paying more per shot because you were more likely to reach people in your desired demograph. But now technology, in the form of data mining and interactive media, is allowing us to narrow the focus down to specific individuals, whom you know by name, address, and buying habit before you ever approach them with a marketing proposition. I call this “assassin marketing” because you’re now hunting for specific individuals, one at a time, and targeting them with a precisely refined message. And increasingly mass customization means you can create a product designed specifically for that individual, as Dell Computer does with its custom-built computers that sell for less than their more traditional counterparts. Dell integrates broadcasting, narrowcasting, and assassin marketing to slice and dice the market, and gobble up their competitors’ market share, underselling them while still making money.
So marketers that want to reach the echoes need to find a way of using the power of today’s tools to identify specific individuals, fashion their product offering for markets as small as one, target them through the media they use most, and appeal to them with a message that’s designed for them. It’s not going to be possible to use old methods to win marketshare. There’s no “one size fits all” way to reach and win the echoes. You have to find and win them one at a time.
If that’s an enormous challenge, it’s also an enormous opportunity. Not many marketers are going to be smart enough, nimble enough, and persistent enough to make this work. Those who do, like Dell, will win, and win big. But before you decide whether you’ve got what it takes, let me hark back to something I said at the beginning: this isn’t just an interesting game. It’s survival. You don’t have a choice. You have to play in this game if you’re going to be here tomorrow.
Richard explores the themes of mass customization, data mining, assassin marketing, and jigsaw products in his most recent best-seller, Who Owns Tomorrow?, available from Viking Canada.
© Copyright, IF Research, January 2004.
by futurist Richard Worzel.
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