Those of you who read my posts know that I routinely write about generational differences and how financial organizations and financial advisors can tailor their marketing and sales efforts to attract each generation.
Specifically, I have talked about the 6 living generations:
- The Greatest Generation (born between 1910 and 1929)
- The Silent Generation (born between 1929 and 1945)
- The Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1963)
- Generation X (born between 1964 and 1981)
- Millennials (born between 1982 and 2004)
- Generation Z (there is no agreement on the name or exact range of birth dates. Some sources start it at the mid or late 1990s but the more widely accepted period starts from the mid 2000s to the present day)
The birth years are the markers that place a group of people within a specific generation. Yet there are those who are born on the cusp of each generation and exhibit tendencies of both the generation they were born into and the preceding or following generation. These folks are known as “cuspers”. A cusper is a person considered to have been born on a cusp between significant generations.
For example, I know a young GenXer (born in 1981) who does not have the typical characteristics of a GenXer. She is optimistic, tech savvy, civic minded and she considers herself a global citizen — all the traits of a Millennial. If you ask this young woman what generation she belongs to she will tell you she feels misplaced as she “feels” more like a Millennial and not a Gen Xer.
As I speak to individuals on the cusp of two generations they feel that the “labels” given to the generational cohort they were born into does not apply to them. Some have asked me “Are you stereotyping everyone in a generation? And if you are I don’t feel those characteristics apply to me. That is because they are on the cusp between two generations.
An article in Good.is.com affirms this viewpoint “Between Generation X and the Millennials, there’s a group of people currently in their late 20s and early 30s who don’t identify with either label. We call them the Xennials — a micro-generation that serves as a bridge between the disaffection of Gen X and the blithe optimism of Millennials”.
These are people born at the tail end of Gen X just prior to the millennial years…hence the term Xennials. To better understand this generation here’s what one Xennial says “I remember once claiming I was a Gen Xer, like my older brother. “No,” he told me, rolling his eyes. “You’re… [weary sigh] something else. Evidently, I am a generational misfit”.
I was born in 1980. According to some sources, this makes me a Gen Xer. According to others, I’m a Millennial. That makes me what then, a Xennial? I take online quizzes, like Pew Research Center’s “How Millennial Are You?”, and land dead between Gen X and Millennial due to my personal habits, body piercings, and so many more reasons”.
This young woman and others like her are part of a micro-generation. An article in Curatti.com describes the emergence of micro-generations “At a time when new technologies, the web and social media impose major changes every three or four years, the concept of demographic sociology as we knew it, does not really correspond to the new realities of the digital society. Today, the concept of generations can’t just be based on age category. It is influenced more by the new behaviors and practices observed within the same group, in relation to modern changes. And even within the new generations, we can observe different motivations according to the changes that occur”.
According to Brandhook.com “Xennials came of age just as the world was experiencing a seismic shift in technology, and it gave them a unique perspective that’s half old-school analog and half new-school digital. They were also the first to grow up with household computers (which they viewed with much wonder and amazement — who could forget the soothing sound of a dialup modem?). Gen Xers were teens or young adults when computers became main stream whereas Millennials can’t even remember a time without computers”.
And it’s not just young Gen Xers who are part of a micro–generation, it also applies to a segment of the Baby Boomer generation. This generation is labeled “Generation Jones“, a title given them by author Jonathan Pontell to describe people born between 1954 and 1965. This group comprises the latter half of the Baby Boomers and the very beginning of Generation X (Gen Xers were born between 1964 to 1981).
The name “Generation Jones” has several connotations, including that of a large anonymous generation, plus the “keeping up with the Joneses” competitiveness. Jonesers were given huge expectations as children in the 1960s, and then confronted with a different reality as they came of age during a long period of mass unemployment (just like Gen X) and when de-industrialization arrived full force in the mid to late 1970s and 1980s, leaving them with a certain unrequited “jonesing” quality for the more prosperous days in the past.
The dividing line between Baby Boomers and Generation Jones is the assassination of JFK. Simply, if you remember the day JFK was assassinated then you are a boomer if not, you’re a Jonser. According to AdAge “Early Boomers had Vietnam and Woodstock, later Boomers had AIDS and personal computers”.
It’s obvious that there are differences even within a particular generation. The bottom line is what I have always said, before you can develop a marketing strategy a financial organization or financial advisor first needs to determine the generations they want to attract. Once the generation is determined it needs to be dissected by the micro-generations and only then can an effective marketing strategy be developed.
For more information about how you can increase your share of the various generations’ business please refer to my blog which provides a number of strategies.
Originally published at www.nancysalamone.com on August 12, 2016.
