Our insights gurus take a look at the problem of trying to fit humanity in all its colourful, erratic glory, into boxes that make sense.
Marketers love market segments. The more we can wrap a bow around a group of consumers and stick a label on them, the easier our jobs seem to be. But every approach to segmentation raises the possibility of two fundamental errors.
The first is that we start to believe the segments have a life beyond our models. Here the mistake is to confuse our models of reality for reality itself. The Polish-American philosopher and engineer Alfred Korzybski put this best when he warned us all that “the map is not the territory”.
The second mistake is to use a map that has little bearing on the territory. Perhaps the map is out of date or, worse, for a completely different place.
You might think the second mistake is an easy one to avoid. But if you have ever used labels like ‘Gen Z’ or ‘Millennials’ in your marketing, you’re making it. This is because the model of segmentation that gives us these generational cohorts is sociological pixie dust that is about as useful as splitting the marketplace by the star signs of a horoscope. If your researchers warned you about Sagittarian shoppers, would you listen?
The notion of ‘generations’ of consumers has a long history but it really gained momentum with what is known as the ‘Strauss-Howe’ generational theory in 1991. This is based on a model that William Strauss and Neil Howe set out in their book Generations, and it is where the notion of Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Generation Y really took hold. It’s a beautifully elegant scheme. But, as any decent social scientist will tell you, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And here things start to fall apart quickly.
When scrutinised, the ‘evidence’ for generational differences reveals itself to be a bundle of non-falsifiable truisms which explain everything and predict nothing. Sure, the stories they tell about Generation Y are often upbeat, fun to read, and eminently quotable, but that doesn’t mean they’re right. What they are is all pastry and no pie. After all, the plural of ‘anecdote’ is not data.
For a start the population, other than the Baby Boomers, isn’t clearly marked by a distinct generational cycle or demographic events. So we get arbitrary breakpoints set up along the continuous conveyor belt of births. Some of these markers are defined by dominant or distinct events in – mostly US – society. Think Trumpism, Watergate, 9/11. Other markers are defined by technological trends. Hence Gen Y are singled out as digital natives; products of the information age.
Which leads us to the problem of labels. Having created a scaffold of different generations the sociologists, and the willing folk in marketing, buy into a whole package of commonly held stereotypes and labels that are widely understood to be ‘official’ categories and identities. But they’re not.
Here is just one example randomly plucked off the internet; Gen Y are widely touted as being more socially tolerant. So let’s take 55 years of Gallup polling in the USA to examine tolerance and approval of, say, interracial marriage. Since 1958 when just four percent of Americans approved, to the present-day, when 94 percent approve, the figures show a straight line growth. In other words everyone is more tolerant. There is no spike in tolerance when Gen X, Y or Z come along.
Or take the tendency by younger people to carve out for themselves an identity that challenges their parents: the rebel yell of the generation gap. In today’s narrative Gen X, Y and Z have to different degrees rejected the values of the Baby Boomers amd Gen X, who are touted as conservative and linear.
But hold on. In the late 1960s it was the Boomers who let out the rebel yell. Wasn’t this the counter-culture? The Woodstock generation? So much for the lifelong labels that each generation is supposed to wear. In truth every younger cohort shocks their parents. The story applies to every generation and the only thing that changes are the specific weapons of rebellion – the hair length, or the skinny jeans versus the bell-bottoms.
Younger generations X, Y and Z are not wired in any special way. They are wired, as all humans are, to be adaptive to the changing world. Some are quick adopters; others play wait and see. All are influenced by the resources they have available to them – whether that is education or spending money. Meanwhile generational segmentation wedges different groups of people into static boxes or stereotypes that are not fit for purpose. It is far more relevant to segment markets in terms of how different tribes or customers navigate the world of change.
The sociologist Philip Cohen perhaps put it best when he said that the notion of generations “become a parody and should end”. Or maybe the British statistician George Box got there first. Box famously said that “all models are wrong but some are useful”. Our argument here is that the notion of generations is clearly wrong and no longer useful. Instead, you need to let your research data drive your segmentation. Don’t cut and paste a disproved solution. Not in the age of Aquarius. Not ever.
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In one regard our argument here is that the notion of generations is an elaborate con and that social science provides a powerful riposte to being conned. But the argument also hides a criticism of many of the ideas that we uncritically use to explain the marketing world. How many of those ideas fall into the same trap as the notion of ‘generations’? To read more about that we highly recommend Matthew Stewart’s The Management Myth: Debunking Modern Business Philosophy.
This article was first published in our December/January 2023/2024 issue.
