The Generation Y it’s the one that includes those who where born in between 1979/80 and 1994/99 depending on who writes about it, and the term Generation Y got popular when Business Week wrote about it in 1999 with the article that has the same name.
People born in this Generation Y (in which I’m included) have some characteristics that clearly show a big jump with our predecessors. We have grown up with he influence of marketing campaigns, the rupture of conventional structures, and the most important the Internet boom, that’s why we are also known as the Google Generation or the iGeneration. These characteristics have made us egocentric and with a lack of sense of belonging to any group or organization. Nowadays people is faithful to persons rather than to organizations.
After going through the article and hearing the MySpace Generation podcast, the first thought that has come to my mind is that it doesn’t matter which is your background or the cultural differences that can be depending on where have grow up, the reality for us is the same. In my personal case, I had heard about MySpace but I had never used it, actually I had to go around the website to make an accurate idea of what MySpace was about. In Spain is more popular a blog called Fotolog (which you also might know about) where also people express their opinions and share with their friends ideas or just events they want to attend. I must say that phenomenons like facebook are almost as big, and I could add necessary, to communicate in Spain than here he US.
Like the article says, we are used to marketing campaigns, and TV advertisements don’t influence us so much what has make our generation a less uniform one than the one was before us. It’s this diversity what makes Internet a powerful tool for marketers to get to the customers. If we give a quick overview to the successful companies in today’s world, most of them are internet based or at least have a strong website which makes them more accessible. I don’t share the opinion that personal selling tends to disappear (as we can hear sometimes) or that internet shopping its replacing going to the malls, but its true that the customers have more information about prices and the product itself what makes him less easily influenced to what a personal seller can tell.
As the environment changes and habits in the generations change marketers should also adapt to this changing world. As the article says brands with an “old” thinking of their product and their consumers find themselves struggling to succeed when years ago where leaders in their branch. Marketers must get into the insights of the consumers and look for their needs to satisfy. With our iGeneration, using blogs as MySpace has been proven as successful or advertising themselves associating their brand to the image they want to give.
To give a quick example of adapting to changes on the needs of consumers I would mention the case of Puma. I know that is not a big brand here in the US, but it didn’t used to be big neither in Europe or Asia, and nowadays it’s almost at the level of Nike or Adidas. They used to be a sports brand struggling which saw in fashion relate to sports a big market in the two continents mentioned. Today, people have the image of Puma as a fashion brand apart from sports clothing with a touch of modernity. Apart from young sport stars as corporative image, they support events like skate competitions or dancing competitions, which has, give them another approach.
To finish with my dissertation about us, the Google Generation, so used to computers, videogames, easy accessibility to information and an own opinion for everything. We should be in all cases aware that the generation before us has also experienced all these changes, and we should still listen to them more having in the top of the head that we are getting into the labor market becoming eventually tomorrow business and political leaders. We should be aware of this significant transition and is in our hands to build a better business world with all the tools and facilities there are nowadays, especially with what has happened economically during the last times what has taken to a leader country like to the US into something not imaginable a few years ago.
