In 2034 – just 14 years from now – Gen Z will overtake millennials as the largest generation in the workforce. Given business’ current approach, we will shift our appeal from millennials and begin pandering to Gen Z. In short, we will not have learned our lesson with the millennial generation at all.
Narrow Your (Millennial) Focus
Millennials are an entire generation, with countless sub-demographics. Pure and simple: it is too broad of a swath of humanity. Narrowing your demographic appeal is a basic marketing 101 concept. Whether we are referring to employee recruitment, association membership, customers or clients – going broad in you appeal, appeals to no one. Yet, constantly we see headlines about selling to millennials, women, or small business. Those categories are absurdly enormous, unmanageable, and diverse. Marketing to any one of them without seriously narrowing the focus is a fool’s errand.
Some of my enterprise clients do refer to their target customers regularly as “women” without any qualifiers. What we know, however, is that the 80-year-old widow in assisted living, with a fixed income, is not their customer. If they sold different services or products, she might be. Instead their female customer lives in a house with a certain resale value. Additionally, her family has a certain minimum household income. She’s busy and shops online. Her age is between 45-65. She shops in certain stores, has a certain education level, and on and on.
This client’s lengthy list of narrowing attributes greatly limits who is actually their ideal customer, and yet it still represents an enormous market share, which they covet highly. Therefore, my client refers to their customer as “women,” in shorthand code, just as many other organizations say “millennials” – without referencing the careful detail and segmenting work their marketing teams have done to identify their true, ideal customer.
Your Millennial Avatar
Savvy organizations build a set of customer avatars. Besides sounding like a sci-fi character, an avatar is a detailed representation of an ideal customer – often an aggregate of several individual customers, if the organization is large enough. For smaller organizations, it might be a representation of a real individual they believe to be representative of other customers they want to attract.
The avatar representation looks at things like gender, education level, job title, type of work, race, income, age, location and family dynamic. It also looks at values, challenges, preferences, social footprint, social groups, and practices. In this way, when marketing content is developed, it speaks directly to this avatar. Building an avatar would be the place to begin with a millennial, just as it is with any other demographic – immediately narrowing the focus to a more empathetic and human level.
Geico is famous for having multiple (successful) campaigns running concurrently, each targeted to a different avatar. The success they have experienced doesn’t keep them from appealing to a very broad base. But the individual marketing messages feel far more personal and appropriate to the right, targeted customer.
Maybe Millennials Just Aren’t Right for You
Generations buy different things at different times. While the gong of “we must appeal to millennials” is still sounding loudly in most quarters, discernment is also key. AARP is not selling to millennials – yet – even though they will be. Churches bemoaning the millennial flight often overlook that in the adult developmental process we don’t necessarily choose to evolve our spirituality until we are in our 40s and 50s. Of course, there are always exceptions to any rule when you narrow the net’s reach, you might lose one or two. Even so, when you do narrow the focus, even customers you weren’t trying to reach will be attracted to you. It is a game of averages – and it works when it is done correctly.
The best approach, when building your avatar is to look at who your organization is already appealing to. If this customer/client/member is not ideal (that is, they will age out of your offering, can’t really afford your offering, or similar misalignment) then it might be time to look at appealing to a new avatar. If millennials seem like a good approach, then at least do them – and yourself – the favor, and narrow your focus considerably. Not only will you not appeal with too broad scope, you also will have a confusing message that could turn off existing stakeholders as well.