Don’t treat all the Boomers the same

I recently had a chance to have interact with Warren Evans, a top international speaker and futurist. Like our team at TomorrowToday, Warren tracks the trends that are shaping the world of work, and has an interest in demographics, technology and other key drivers of change.

Having heard Warren talk about demographics, I checked out the video snippet on his website. He makes a great point. Simply put, he is skeptical about generations. Actually, he is skeptical about how people use generational theory as a blunt instrument. They talk about “Boomers” or “Gen Y” as if everyone born in one twenty year period is identical. This is an abuse of the theory, of course, but is often how it is used. At very least, one has to take into account the cuspers (those born between the generations). But one should also consider that younger and older cohorts within a generation are often quite different too.

As Warren points out, treating the Boomers as a homogenous group is not only silly, it’s also dangerous. The pace of change in the 1950s and 60s was so fast that what may at first glance appear to be only one generation (“the Boomers”) is in fact three generations. If you were born in 1947, you had a very different growing up experience from someone born in 1966. The promise of demography is that we can predict what someone aged 64 will do (and that you will do the same things at age 64 that people who were 64 in 2001 or 1995 or 1975 did). Yet, younger Boomers and older Boomers had different starting points, different life experiences and now live in different life stages.

I think Warren is right about this. As Einstein is reported to have said, “The sign of a true genius is the ability to simplify complex information as much as possible. But not more so.” Generational theory has a compelling pop psychology appeal to it. But some people have simplified it too much.

We’re working on a new model that brings together the concept of younger and older cohorts, and integerates this with the concept of cuspers. Of course, we also have to consider other psychographic influences, such as religion, gender, culture, class and socioeconomics. So, segmentation models are tough to get right. But the value of doing them properly is enormous. It allows one to deliver on the promise of demographics by understanding how behaviour will change as new lifestages are reached.

That’s the kind of stuff that gets me out of bed in the morning! Feel free to contact me if you want to chat about this more: graeme@tomorrowtoday.uk.com

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