I, Steven Charles Lerch, am a millennial.
And I get it. I’m crazy desirable to marketers. I’m like the girl at the bar playing hard to get. I’m complicated. I’m hard to talk too. But once you win me over, you’re getting decades and decades of that sweet sweet lifetime value.
So I guess it’s no surprise that all you marketers can’t stop talking about me and my compatriots. You are as obsessed with us as we supposedly are with Netflix, avocado toast, and participation trophies. Every time I give a speech at a conference, there is someone on the agenda talking about marketing to millennials. The best messaging strategies. The best targeting strategies. The do’s and don’ts.
And to put it bluntly, I just don’t get it. I have never understood this obsession with focusing on these generational constructs. “Boomers do this. Gen X thinks this way. Millennials buy these.” At this point, I may sound like I’m living up to one of my millennial stereotypes (which you can hear about in every millennial themed conference speech ever), by not wanting to be put into a box. But that’s not the case. “Boxes” are good. “Boxes” are useful. We’re just trying so desperately to draw boxes around the wrong things.
A millennial, by most definitions, is someone born in the 80s or early 90s. In other words, as of today, a millennial is someone in their late 20s or 30s. From there, we assigned these people a whole host of characteristics:
Millennials are tech savvy and glued to their phones
Millennials are environmentally and socially conscious
Millennials care about the values of the brands they buy from
Millennials are more politically correct
Millennials don’t like being told what to do or being labeled
Millennials are disloyal to brands
Millennials are obsessed with social platforms and sharing
The list goes on and on. Google “Millennial Cliches” and you’ll be reading for hours. And for all I know, these things are generally accurate. Or at least these attributes more accurately describe millennials than other generations. So when it comes down to it, marketers target millennials because they identify a shared set of psychographics that are highly prevalent in this subset of their audience. You may even hear some “clever” marketers say that “millennial is a mindset, not an age.” Well first of all. No. And second of all, fine. Let’s say that it is. Then stop talking about, and stop building your strategy around age groups.
Demographic and age range based targeting should be considered horribly outdated technology for the vast majority of advertisers (with some exceptions for sure). If you target millennials because you believe they’re environmentally conscious, then 9 times out of 10 you’d be just as happy to target environmentally conscious people who are 42. If you target millennials because you think they love tacos, then you could probably also sell to a 53 year old who loves tacos.
Digital advertising platforms have gotten so efficient and effective at targeting consumers based on psychographics that we don’t need to rely on demographics anymore. It’s not difficult, it’s not expensive, and it’s not time consuming to identify and target your strategies around the characteristics that truly define your audiences.
Last time I checked, Google Analytics was free and there is an entire section called Audience with an entire subsection called Interests. In two minutes I could tell you if you’re customers prefer football to soccer, like dogs or cats, and a hundred other useful bits of psychographic data that are likely far more indicative of being a high potential target for your business than what age they are. Do yourself a favor. Navigate to that “Interests” report in Google Analytics, sort the page by some metric of quality (probably conversion rate if you are an ecommerce business), and try to find some patterns and some insights in that data. Then draw your boxes around those learnings.
Boxes can be useful and sometimes necessary to keep marketing plans in order. Especially if you allow your boxes to change over time, for people to pass between them, and for customers to exist in more than one box at once. You can draw them around new customers and returning customers. You can draw them around customers interested in one type of product or another. You can even attempt to draw them around types of people.
For me personally, you can put me in the box of people who eat too much candy or drink too much Mountain Dew. The box of people who are college graduates and buy too many Phillies hats. The box of people who love rec league sports, never miss a Marvel movie, and own a home. The box of people who love to vacation at the beach or the box of people who enjoy grilling. All of which, if you ask me, are more indicative of my past behaviors and more predictive of my future behaviors, than the fact that I’m 32.