Gen X, gen Y – it’s generation con, actually

Christopher Scanlon, writing for The Age (Australian newspaper) on 24 July 2006, questions the simplistic way in which some people approach and utilise generational theory. (Read it here, or below).

They are the generation that has slipped the marketers’ net. Raised in a society saturated by media and technology, by age eight they’ve consumed more images and information than any previous generation before. They know the standard repertoires of the ad-men and can guess the punchline of an ad before it’s finished.

With so much technology at their fingertips and so many screens vying for their attention, marketers simply don’t know which way to jump. A single ad campaign with a single message simply won’t wash with this generation of media savvy 20-somethings.

Their lifestyles are so complex, their tastes so diverse and fast-changing, that any marketer that does manage to corner them has their work cut out keeping them. They demand customised, individualised products to match their complex lifestyles and multiple identities. Patronise them and you can kiss them goodbye. Educated, media savvy and smart, they’re beyond the range of the marketer’s siren song. Such is the standard copy for generation Y, anyway.

The problem with this thumbnail sketch, which is regularly served up by advertisers and faithfully reported by the media – including a host of articles in recent years in this newspaper – is that pretty much the same things were said about generation X and, before them, the baby boomers.

A 1992 Business Week article, for example, declared that generation X was “far more knowledgeable about and suspicious of advertising than earlier generations passing through their 20s”. The only way to reach them was for marketers to acknowledge the artifice of their trade through irony and humour. Hence the Sprite ads throughout the late 1990s, which informed savvy gen X beverage consumers that a soft-drink would not make them more attractive, better at sport or more successful. “Image is Nothing. Thirst is Everything. Obey Your Thirst”, ordered those anti-establishment rebels at Sprite.

Essentially the same story was told about the counterculture and the hippies in the 1960s. The “New Advertising”, as Thomas Frank refers to it in his history of the US advertising industry The Conquest of Cool, presented itself as a reaction to the supposed dull conformity of the 1950s. Brands like VW and 7-Up flattered the baby boomers as free-thinking individuals who couldn’t be bought off by the patronising guff served by the paternalistic advertisers of the 1950s. They consciously called attention to the fact that advertising was a sham designed to have one over on the consumer.

Although the technology and some of the generational character traits were different – Xers are supposed to be cynical nihilists borne of spending too many years in unemployment, boomers and Yers are cheery optimists – the core message of the ad industry has remained pretty much the same: these people are too smart to sell to.

Of course, such generational generalisations evaporate when subjected to even the slightest examination. There are many boomers who haven’t done it easy and, despite what the superannuation ads say, aren’t headed for a retirement of luxury holidays, just as there are many Xers who never owned Nirvana’s Nevermind and – despite being perfectly sober at the time – can’t remember where they were when they heard about Kurt Cobain’s suicide.

But then again, the point of this exercise isn’t sociology so much as it is flattery. And the point of flattering a bunch of people within a certain age range that their collective experience has made them so wise that they’d eluded advertisers is, of course, the first part of the pitch.

But for all their independence and savvy, these consumers haven’t made much of a dent in consumer capitalism – or the ad industry, for that matter. Both seem to be going from strength to strength.

Flattering a generation of consumers has proven an effective way to create a niche market. The strategy is simple enough: conduct a market survey, write a report about the target market gushing about their media savvy and intelligence, being sure to distinguish them from other generations, slap a pithy label on them and hope that the media pick it up so the target market starts to identify with the tag so as to more effectively sell stuff to them.

Saying all this will strike many readers as a statement of the bleeding obvious – which it is. The question, then, is why do otherwise intelligent journalists persist in serving up this marketing tosh without a hint of criticism?

Christopher Scanlon is a co-editor of Arena Magazine (www.arena.org.au) and a researcher with RMIT University’s Globalism Institute.

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