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The Marketing Student | Generation Y Marketing Insights

Generation Y consumer behavior, marketing, advertising, Gen Y attitudes

Generation Y Will Be The Helicopter Parents From HellAugust 17

Think Gen X and Boomers are too close to their kids? Just wait til we’re moms and dads.

Gen Y has learned that normal parental behaviour involves constant checking-in and hand-holding. For better or worse, that’s another article for another time.

Imagine the big-brother-like level of coddling Generation Y will bestow upon its children. Armed with technology, our ability to stay informed about everything our children do will be almost total.

At least Gen X had freedom
I stay in touch with my parents through email regularly. The great majority of my peers do the same. Everyone in my immediate family has a cellphone and we call and text each other almost daily. A smaller slice of my friends have their parents on Facebook and on their instant messenger, also using those channels to stay in touch.

This might seem like too much communication — but the thing is, I want my family to know what’s going on with me, and I want to know what’s going on with them. In conversations with some Gen X peers, the last thing they wanted is for their parents to be able to keep tabs on them. To quote one directly:

If there needs to be a leash of some kind, I want the longest one possible.

When Genera

In The Future, Advertising Will Be AwkwardJuly 31

As advertising continues to get more targeted and specific, it will soon be very scary and creepy to see ads. They will be a reflection of what marketers think of you. Ads will be served to you based on a general consumer profile, tweaked and customized based on your personal buying behaviour.

Check out this technology from …where else…Japan that allows advertisers to customize the content of billboards using cameras. The cameras use face-detection technology to analyze the person walking by, then tells the billboard to serve the appropriate ad (link)

On the surface, this is harmless. Quite innovative and novel, actually. But this could also go really really wrong, really really fast.

This is what Times Square looks like today (click):

Ideally, this would transform into:

A Look At How Gen Y CommunicatesJune 16

Boomers had it pretty simple back in their youth. Want to connect with your friends? Write them a letter, give them a call or go and see them.

Gen X-ers had a little more fun. They could’ve emailed each other over 28.8 or used their pagers to send 1-sentence messages back and forth.

Here’s what Generation Y uses to stay in touch.

To an outsider, it can be a confusing to understand how Gen Y uses those channels just to talk to each other. After all, Boomers just had three channels and they made friends just fine.

To put things in context, here’s what my communication habits are like and how I use the above.

Looking at that chart makes me envy my father’s generation. They didn’t have to worry about drunk texts. Or having perso

A Look At How Gen Y CommunicatesJune 16

Boomers had it pretty simple back in their youth. Want to connect with your friends? Write them a letter, give them a call or go and see them.

Gen X-ers had a little more fun. They could’ve emailed each other over 28.8 or used their pagers to send 1-sentence messages back and forth.

Here’s what Generation Y uses to stay in touch.

To an outsider, it can be a confusing to understand how Gen Y uses those channels just to talk to each other. After all, Boomers just had three channels and they made friends just fine.

To put things in context, here’s what my communication habits are like and how I use the above.

Looking at that chart makes me envy my father’s generation. They didn’t have to worry about drunk texts. Or having perso

Not Part of Gen Y? You’re Paying Too MuchJune 12

Thinking back to my experience working on the sales floor of a consumer electronics retailer, I had the opportunity to see firsthand the effects of marketing and advertising. As a Marketing student, this was extremely exciting. Being exposed to consumer behaviour this close made me feel a bit like Jane Goodall, but with much much smarter gorillas who happened to have money.

This experience also confirmed that yes, Gen Y presents an interesting challenge to the marketing and sales teams of the future. There was a distinct difference in the way my transactions with Gen Y-ers went, as opposed to Gen X and Baby Boomers.

Selling to Boomers vs Gen Y

Here’s how a typical interaction with a Boomer would go, let’s say, for a printer.

Me:: “Hi! Welcome to ABC Electronics. How can I help?”
Boomer: “Hi. I need a printer.”
Me: “Alright, that’s something I can help you with. Let’s take a look at the printer aisle.”
Boomer: “You know what, I don’t know anything about printers. Just recommend me something.”
Me: “Sure, but first, let’s find out what you need from the printer. Do you have a printer now?”

This interaction would continue for a while as I probed for information to mak