All Millennials Are Not The Same

Claire Wood, Associate Planner at Leith, on why marketing to special little snowflakes is wrong. Because (spoiler alert!) they don’t exist!

We spend a lot of time talking about big data. The unprecedented opportunities to create tailored and even individual pieces of communication posed by knowing so much stuff about our target audience. We also love to speak about Millennials.

And therein, you have a perfect contradiction. We’re cleverer than ever. We know where you’ve clicked already so we can tell you something different next time you look. But we still persist in batching together a whole pack of people as they have birth dates within a (loose) time span. Another of those ‘surgeon, heal thyself’ contradictions that we bump into now and again.

In case you’ve been confined to a remote desert location for the past few years, without even a satellite phone for company, let’s recap. The Urban Dictionary offers a wonderful definition of a Millennial. Special little snowflakes all. A product of guilt, of encouragement over effort, of a proliferation of technology that breeds opposable thumbs as standard, they’re conditioned to expect the moon on a plate and be disappointed if it’s anything less than werewolf full.

Broadly speaking, we’re talking about young(ish) people aged approximately 20 to approximately 34. I use ‘approximately’ advisedly — as no-one seems wholly able to agree on the actual age of Millennials. Just that they were ‘coming of age’ in Y2K.

Lots of people have spent lots of money investigating how we should speak to Millennials. Like they’ve tipped off the edge of their spaceship, fallen down to earth and landed blinking (their three eyes) in front of us, wondering who’ll make the first move.

They want very different things to us, so the experts would have us believe. Their definition of adulthood is financial independence. Given house prices now, that’s no mean feat. But it doesn’t differ markedly to my own definition of adulthood. (I am long past the cut off date, having streaked past 34 some long years ago.)

But more importantly, they have a profoundly different definition of happiness. ZenithOptimedia have ‘discovered’ that happiness for Millennials is achieved through a winsome combination of freedom and control. By controlling their career, finances and work/life balance, they have the freedom to pursue their passion. Sounds very much like how I (try to) organise my own (old) life.

My favourite quote from Zenith’s study:

“In contrast to previous generations, Millennials feel they are judged on how they express themselves, not by what they own.”

According to Zenith, this explains why social media has become so important for this generation. But shouldn’t these sentences be the other way around? Caught in the bear trap of the multiple wonderful opportunities to express themselves, Millennials are experiencing unprecedented sleep disruption, anxiety, and poor mental health BECAUSE of the pressure to partake in these social channels and the consequent pressure on how they present themselves therein.

Mark Ritson has a lovely rant over at Marketing Week. Plump with soundbites, he expostulates:

“For starters, if you have been around longer than two years, you might have noticed that the ‘unique characteristics’ that define Millennials are the bloody same traits we were ascribing to Generation Y not that long ago, and Generation X before that.”

Hear hear.

I accept that many in this age group have common traits:

1. Millennials are selfish (so am I)

2. Millennials love technology (I’ve just been shown the turn yourself into a dog / rainbow vomit feature on snapchat. Hours of fun)

3. Many Millennials appear unable to live offline. (George wrote a lovely post about this appealing character trait a wee while back.)

4. They’re a social generation. (Where I’m a hermit.)

5. They’re looking for adventure. (Twice as likely to be willing to encounter danger in pursuit of excitement as other generations, apparently.)

6. They’re seeking a more meaningful existence. (Funny. I spend my time eating popcorn and watching Gossip Girl.)

But beyond those extraordinarily distinctive traits, are there any commonalities?

My cousin is a Millennial. She deleted her Facebook account when she felt she was wasting too much time. (Her one social indulgence is Instagram - an account for her cats.) She went straight to university, walked up and down streets handing in CVs until she got a job when she graduated. She learnt how to make suits on Savile Row. She achieved financial independence. She isn’t a big fan of adventure, though she did take a city break to Germany to visit her sister.

My other cousin, her brother, also a Millennial, uses Facebook in emergencies only. Sends those strange rudimentary texts of the young. He did one degree, worked for a bit, didn’t like it, wanted to do something different (more meaningful?) with his life. Is now studying architecture as a second degree. He mostly buys tracing paper with spare money as designing buildings on screen doesn’t appeal. So he takes a pen and draws.

A third Millennial cousin recently moved to the UK from Canada. She’s a scientist. She loves music, whiskey, coffee, tattoos. She spends most of her spare money on cats. (She gifted the newly acquired cats to the first cousin.) True to her kind, she does live on Facebook but smartly. She doesn’t post photos of herself getting drunk; she posts photos of cats. (Or pugs in costumes.)

Another cousin (I have many cousins), also a Millennial, exhibited only one selfish trait: a low-slung impractical sports car as a final fling before they started having babies. He now keeps an eye on aeroplanes and makes sure they don’t hit each other (or hit drones), raises two children and runs marathons in his spare time. (2:48 in London at the weekend. I know this from Facebook!)

These guys are all aged somewhere between 25 and 30. They all live in different parts of the UK. They do different jobs, different things with their spare time, have varying relationships with social media and technology, have various preferences when it comes to brands and various preferences about how they’d like / expect / hope that brands or products or services would talk to them. But according to us lazy marketeers, they’re all Millennials.

I thought we’d moved on from the bad old days of talking about 18–34s who ‘work hard play hard’. Apparently not.