The Boomer Project

I highly recommend the Boomer Project as the pre-eminent resource for everything you could want to or need to know about the Baby Boomer generation.

Why does Generation Y love luxury brands

Recently answered this HARO inquiry by a student for an article on "Irrational Spending in Generation Y" for her NYU Journalism Class:

"My article is about how Generation Y spends money with false rationales. What are the psychological and sociological reasons for spending on luxury goods when there are loans to pay? What influence do advertising and pop culture play in the demand for luxury goods?"

MY RESPONSE:
Ah, Generation Y, lovingly referred to in marketing circles as “Generation Why” or “Generation Why Not”.

Why does Generation Y spend money with false rationale? Why they’re not “false rationale” at all! The U.S. today is full of example after example of bail-outs. Gen Y has been raised with “helicopter” parents who protect from every harm and admonish nay-sayers that their child is NOT at fault for anything they do, federal bail-outs including those on the scale of Bear Stearns, Freddie Mac/Fannie Mae, the mortgage industry (I could go on ad infinitum and ad nauseum) where managers walk away with their heads held high and millions in their pockets, bankruptcy protection rates soaring again. You get the point.

So, if a Gen Y’er can’t lose, why not spend like there’s no tomorrow. In their frame of reference, there IS only today. Modern culture for young Gen Y’ers has also included U.S. participation in war after war and terrorism-you-can-touch brought to American soil. So, there may not be a “tomorrow”, either. A very different "feel" from the Cold War of the baby boomer's generation.


What part does advertising and pop culture play in the demand for luxury goods? Manufacturers and retailers are in business to make a profit. Period. And, advertising’s goal is to encourage more sales to make those businesses more profit by playing to the attributes of the target market. And, play to them, they do. Gen Y’ers are really being “played”. Advertisers are pushing ever more expensive must-have items. Imaginative brain-teasing toys and games, or even create-your-own fun games, have been replaced with follow-the-leader computer games and virtual worlds.

Pop culture is fraught with celebra-mania. Gen Y’ers see how easy – and “fulfilling” – it is to be a celebrity. Celebs represent the “good life”, lots of stuff and doing nothing more than smiling at a camera to get it.

Gen Y was raised amidst the explosion of instant communication and, thus, instant gratification. Just look at the anecdotal evidence, such as the explosive rise of social media and alternative newspapers where articles are reduced to no more than sound bites themselves and we communicate in 3 minute or less video vignettes.


A better question may be: what would Gen Y do without electricity?

Good source: the folks at Iconoculture.com.

Generations defined, the "Greatest", Boomers and beyond

The "Greatest Generation" refers to Americans who fought/lived in the era of World War II, preceded by the Lost Generation of the 20s and immediately followed by the Silent Generation of the 50s.

"Baby boomers" refers to the huge group of people born between 1946 and 1966.

One-third of American employees today are boomers. With many of us retiring within the next 5-10 years, there will be an equally huge gap in the economy: not enough qualified native workers available, for one. Companies are bound to employ immigrants and foreign workers. Trends such as part-time jobs, flex hours, telecommuting and outsourcing have been results of boomers.

What else will be strained? the tax system, retirement benefits, healthcare costs and insurance coverages as well as financial markets.

The labels for the generations following baby boomers are a bit muddied depending upon the source, but, in general, are as follows:

"Generation Jones", aka "Cusp Boomers", born between Baby Boomers and Generation X (between mid 1950s and mid 1960s), also referred to as Jonesers or as GenJonesers in the U.S., U.K., Western Europe, Australia and in New Zealand.


"Generation X", aka the 13th Generation or "Baby Busters", born between mid 1960s and 1980, are highly entrepreneurial and tech-savvy individuals, contributing to the growth of the web and social media such as -- the founders of Amazon, Dell, Google, MySpace, Wikipedia and Yahoo. (Gen Xers were featured in the movie, Reality Bites)

"XY Cusp Generation", aka the MTV Generation or the Doom Generation, born between mid-70s and mid-80s.

"Boomerang Generation", aka Generation ‘Why’, born between 1977 and 1989, usually prefer to return home to parents, while taking care to continue with their own social and professional lives, hence the term "boomerang".

Boomer parents are often referred to as "Helicopter Parents" for their constant hovering and participation in their children's lives, a distinct difference from Boomers own parents from the "Greatest Generation".

"Generation Y", aka Echo Boom, or Millennials, are born after Generation X, usually in the 80s and 90s.


"iGeneration", or the Internet generation, the sub-generation comprised of late born Gen Y (1991-1999) and early born Gen Z (2000-2005). Bet Apple is happy with this designation!


"Generation Z" is the youngest of all the generations so far.

Check http://www.blogger.com/www.BabyBoomCaretaker.com for more resources on generational trends. Good to know if you are marketing ANYTHING as each generation tends to have their own uniqueness to which you must adhere.

Social Media and Youth, just realized my nephew looks like an idiot online

"What, if anything, are kids/young adults taught in grade school/high school and/or college re: online profiles and social media such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc.? What if you found out that your college-age nephew, who is slated to take over the family business after college, looks like a total idiot online. How do we teach our upcoming "young professionals" that posting pics of themselves in nothing but a diaper at Halloween is just not appropriate? I'd be interested to hear from those in the education profession, too."

I posted this question on LinkedIn and to my peers on Help A Reporter Out, generating some great responses. Here was the winner IMO and excerpts from some of the others:

Michael Merrick Crooks

• The mere fact that you must say something to some people is an indication that your breath will be wasted. At which point you are better off saying nothing.
• Social media = Darwin's Theory of Natural Cyber Selection in which the dregs of the employment pool will drown themselves and float to the top making it easy to spot the one's worth hiring. They'll be the ones with their head above water.
• Basically, Social Media is the new-age gene pool test. But unlike the past where Darwin Awards winners would actually kill themselves ... nowadays they simply shoot themselves in the foot.

Other excerpts:

• I'm a French teacher in Belgium and I believe that the best way of teaching teenagers about dangers of the web is presenting them with stories about what people did live through after putting such material online. Just stories, not trying to convince them any other way. They have to think about it and you can't make people think.
  Pieter Jansegers http://frenchteachers.ning.com
  
  
• In my college experience, we were constantly taught that future employers, as well as current professors, would be looking at our online profiles. We were often reminded to remove anything we wouldn't want employers to see. This subject was discussed by many professors in class and employers at job fairs/information sessions, and the school sent several emails about it as well.
  Christine Stoddard http://momcentral.com
  
  
• “Don’t Let Facebook Kill Your Career!" “What is viewable to your sorority sisters, drinking buddies and family can often be seen by potential and current employers. This can cost you a dream job or that big promotion. With the job market so tight and information so widely available, more and more employers are either checking up on, or screening applicants using the Internet. Social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace give employers a snapshot into the kind of person who might be walking into their office. You won’t find this kind of information on a resume. The question becomes, ‘Do you want this person working for you?’ We strongly suggest that our applicants ‘clean’ up their profiles or make their postings private in order to present the best possible face for potential employers.”
  Here are 3 sample tips:
  
  • The Early Bird. Start the process early. If you are just establishing your online identity use caution. Imagine if your grandmother logged on and viewed your profile. What you feel embarrassed? Ashamed? If so, ask yourself if you are posting the best representation of yourself.
  • Management Track. Ok. It's too late to start over - your business is already out there! What can you do? First, clean up everything you can and then make anything personal "private".
  • Picture Perfect. A picture paints a thousand words. If you are a party, watch out who is taking pictures and how they might make you look. Remember, you can watch what you post but other people can post too - and you don't get to edit. Keep the lampshade off your head and your clothes on!
  Cyndi Nieto, CEO, Elite Placement Group, Inc., she has been an expert for BusinessWeek magazine, Entrepreneur magazine and USA Today among others.
  
  
• It hasn’t taken long for employers to realize that Facebook and MySpace are a great way to find out more about potential candidates beyond what’s included in the typical resume. Unfortunately for some job seekers, this may mean finding out how many beers they bonged in Acapulco.
  
  That’s what Toni McLawhorn, director of career services at Roanoke College in Virginia, saw when she signed up for Facebook to see what the fuss was about. “Some were not bad at all, but other profiles were bizarre; just things that you would not want an employer to see,” she says. “Even though they might not be illegal, they might not give the best picture of you.”
  
  Students don’t generally think about how their profiles might affect future career choices, say career services directors. The idea of employers and the public using Facebook as a hiring tool has blindsided many students.“Their own sense of their world and who they’re connecting with may not include those entities [employers],” says Dale Austin, director of career services at Michigan’s Hope College. “Then when they find out they had access to it they think, ‘Oh my God what’s happened!’”
  
  “These sites give the illusion of privacy, but that is all that it is – an illusion,” says Gary Wipperman, CIO and director of information technology systems at Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa. “Information from these sites can be used by potential employers to make hiring decisions, by law enforcement in investigations and by others with less justifiable intentions.”
  
  So, what should students do to make sure their Facebook profile doesn’t ruin their chances of getting hired? For starters, members should clean them up, and to keep private information private. “A good rule of thumb is to not put anything on there that you would not want to show your own grandmother,” says Austin.
  
  Students can change their privacy settings in Facebook so that only their friends – rather than everyone – can see their profile. They should also exclude faculty, grads and alumni from seeing their profile until their job search is over.
  
  Doug Hamilton, director of career counseling at Birmingham-Southern College in Birmingham, Ala., suggests using Facebook as a way to network with other students for employment leads and ideas. “One student placed a Career Services link on their profile,” he says. “We are not preaching to not use Facebook but to always put your best face forward.”
  Laura Snyder, Dick Jones Communications
  
  
• They want everything in real time, but what toll will this take? Because information is available immediately, young adults don’t always think ahead- including what they post on their online profiles.
  
  They are used to collaborating online and generating personal information for strangers. The workplace is showing the strains of the tools as well: Can you make a good decision on a Blackberry screen? What are the positives and negatives of keeping an online profile updated with personal info- is there really privacy anymore? For students especially, there’s information overload and they practically have the internet in their pocket! Now, when kids get an assignment to do a paper on the Civil War, they spend hours online doing the research—almost too much information. They need to learn how to narrow things down. Like an uncensored online profile, they also have to learn to step back before they push send. Instead of the “drunken 3 am phone call when you get home”, teens today are sending messages instantly while still at the party!
  
  If we ask a family today what is education? The responses are:
  
  • Mom-“What You Know”
  • Dad-“Who You Know”
  • Kids- “How to know where to go when you need to know” (Relying strongly on the internet)
    
    
  *From a PEW Research Report: The smart person in the information age will know which media to use when
  • 96% of all students who have access to the Internet use social networking: chat, text messaging, blogging, visiting online communities
  • 71% use social networking sites at least weekly
  • 41% post comments on message boards every week
  • 9% upload video of their own creation at least weekly
  • 25% update their personal Web site or online profiles at least weekly
  • 30% report having their own blogs
  Staci Weiner, http://www.schwartz.com/
  Liz Hamburg, COO, ApplyWise.com
  
  
• I’m a 24 year old communications professional – I graduated college less than 2 years ago. Facebook first premiered when I was a junior (I already had a MySpace page at that point). Here are some of the warnings I received while in school: Many of my professors warned that recruiters and HR managers were looking at social networking profiles before bringing in potential interview candidates. We were warned to keep our photos professional and our profiles private (viewable only to our friends, or our networks).
  
  Yet, as my internship coordinator pointed out, even private profiles weren’t 100% safe. As an example, let’s say I’m about to graduate Marist College – I have a Facebook profile, but it’s set to private. I apply for a job at Company X, which happens to have several low-level, recently graduated staffers who also graduated from Marist. Since we are on the same ‘network’ on Facebook (the Marist network), these staffers at Company X would still be able to see my private profile.
  Rob Gedarovich, Account Executive, CreativePartners.com
  
  
• I really appreciated your request today because I spend a large percentage of my FLIPPING BURGERS AND BEYOND blog posts on this subject of being very careful of a young person's image on the internet. Here's one such blog post.
  
  In fact, the "rising sophomore" of the above blog post is someone who cares very much about his image, very much believes in what I've taught him (there's a post about his appreciation of what I taught him), and yet when I told him to take the idiotic picture off his Facebook profile, his response to me was, "But I thought Facebook was only for social networking." I then wrote the above post to make sure he got what I meant.
  Phyllis Zimbler Miller, www.flippingburgersandbeyond.blogspot.com
  
  
• I am a 25 year old marketing professional. I recently graduated from Penn State, with a degree in corporate communication, and many of my professors, as well as the career counselor, emphasized the importance of online profiles. Now that employers can Google an applicant, and see exactly how drunk you were last weekend via your MySpace profile, they wanted to be sure that we understood how important these online profiles have become in the workplace.
  
  I frequently Google myself (even more so when I'm in the midst of a job search), just so I can be sure that I am in control of what comes up. If you Google me now, I believe that only my Jobster profile shows up. It notes my interests, my location, and my previous positions. It's almost like a resume back-up, confimring that I am really what I say I am.
  
  I do have a Facebook profile, as well as a MySpace profile. The Facbook profile is mainly professional, with some "fun" things thrown in: a "flair" application, a garden, some old photos from high school. The MySpace profile is completely private, and is un-searchable. While it is appropriate for employers, some of my friends' profiles may not be, and I don't want that to influence someone's decision about ME.
  Megan D. Rothman
  
  
• I wanted to pass along some information from the recently-released Cox Tween Internet Safety Survey. This will give you some good background information about what tweens are up to these days online.
  Key findings from the Cox Tween Internet Safety Survey are:
  • Ninety percent of tweens report having used the Internet by nine years-old.
  • Tweens online presence doubles or even triples between the ages of eight to ten and eleven to twelve.
  • Thirty-four percent of eleven and twelve year-olds have a profile on a social networking site. Tweens with social networking profiles post more personal information online.
  • More than one in five tweens post information about themselves online, including pictures, the city they live in and how old they are. Twenty-seven percent of tweens ages eleven to twelve admit to posting a fake age online
  • Twenty-eight percent of tweens have been contacted over the Internet by someone they don’t know.
  • The percentage of tweens that tell parents “a lot” or “everything” they do online drops rapidly with age. Only sixty-nine percent of eleven to twelve year-olds tell Mom and Dad a lot/everything versus eighty-six percent of eight year-olds to ten year-olds.
  • Of tweens who have been contacted online by someone they don't know (twenty-eight percent), eighteen percent keep the messages to themselves, and eleven percent have chatted with the unknown person.
  Todd DeFeo, Account Executive, Weber Shandwick Worldwide
  
  
• Feel free to use information from the following links at my blog:
  http://lgbusinesssolutions.typepad.com/solutions_to_grow_your_bu/2008/07/everything-you.html
  http://lgbusinesssolutions.typepad.com/solutions_to_grow_your_bu/2008/06/can-b2b-marketi.html
  Lewis Green, Chief Communications Officer and Founder, L&G Business Solutions
  
  
• My daughter says she is smart enough not to post embarrassing stuff about herself, but there is not much she can do if her cellphone-camera-wielding buds post their embarrassing thoughts andphotos of her. I think that the opposition-research teams of the presidential campaign of 2040 (and beyond) are going to have plenty to work with. And, Photoshop manipulations to create new realities in the Facebook photos can add to the mix, also.
  Miles Abernathy, http://399Retouch.com
  
  
• As an educator, I use some social media in my high school biology class and also have much discussion on what it all means. I am also a group of educators who are working on digital citizenship curriculum to help with this. Rather than block the use of social media in classrooms, we believe the only way to teach students the best use of them is to use them well.
  Louise Maine, http://hurricanemaine.blogspot.com
  
  
• I work with an independent college consultant who helps high schoolers select colleges and work through the college admission process. The subject of social media profiles is of growing interest to college admission counselors across the country, and what kids do with their profiles can affect the college selection process.
  Wendy Carver-Herbert, President, Carver-Communications, Inc.

Are you a JoBro fan?

Ok, my hearing is finally back after what seemed to be a gazillion tweens all screaming at the same time. Where? At the recent Jonas Brothers concert at the Virginia Beach Verizon Wireless venue. It was our gift to Bertel for his 9th birthday. And, Jillian, at 11-1/2, reaped the benefits as well. She experienced her 1st concert sore throat!

Maybe I'm aging myself, but the screaming reminded me of film clips from The Beatles first concerts in the U.S. back in the 60s. I could barely hear the boys for all of the screaming and audience singing.

I was brought back to the present, though; it was amazing to see the proliferation of texting going back and forth in VB that night.

See the pics here: http://hamptonroads.com/2008/08/one-magical-night-jonas-brothers-blew-crowd-away

Marketing for the Next Generation

Marketing will be the most important area of expertise for the next generation of business leaders, according to 29% of surveyed business executives.
Source: Institute of International Research (June 2005).

Bring the best of both worlds together – Sales and Marketing. Sales is the act of selling products or services, and it’s Marketing that gets you in the door. They work together.